Absolute Faith
by Covalent Bond
Summary: Why was Brennan so flustered after Booth kissed her in the bull pen? And how does she know Seeley Booth is a good man? Starts with Booth's POV but will switch to Brennan's POV in chapter 2. Spoilers for 9th season episodes already aired, including Secret in the Proposal & Sense in the Sacrifice.
1. Parity

**Author's Explanation:** This set comes out of three driving needs on my part. The first, as you will ironically note when you begin reading this and see the POV where it begins, is to explore Brennan's leap of faith in the Secret in the Proposal. The second need was to write something relaxing and angst-free this week. The third, was to savor that kiss in the FBI bull pen because, well ... Booth will explain. This begins with Booth, but only because you'll be seeing the End in the Beginning. ;)

* * *

~Q~

**Parity:**

1**:** the quality or state of being equal or equivalent

6**:** the symmetry of behavior in an interaction of a physical entity (as a subatomic particle) with that of its mirror image

~Q~

* * *

We're coming out of the interrogation room and Bones is telling me she thinks Pelant is framing Flynn. And it's not rational.

I mean, even I know it's not because there is actual evidence of guilt. The evidence against Flynn is circumstantial, but it's about the same quality and kind as the evidence she found convincing enough to believe that her father killed Directer Kirby. She never doubted _that_, but she doubts Flynn's guilt. Bones is always rational except not now and this doesn't make sense to me.

It's a little bit scary, actually.

We start to argue about it. This is nothing new: when we're talking, I can pretty much guarantee we are also arguing. She never agrees with me about _anything_.

Except for this.

She believes Pelant framed Flynn because that's what _I_ believe.

I stop walking.

I can't help it — everything has stopped, the world has gone mad, Temperance Brennan is not arguing with me about my gut instincts. Even when she's trusted it in the past, there has always been some nugget of evidence to back her up but there's nothing this time. Nothing but circumstances lining up against Flynn vs instincts I can't explain, and she's all about evidence and fact. I'm always the one willing to take the leap, so it's no surprise that I'm believing in Flynn because my gut tells me he's innocent and I'm never wrong when it speaks to me. I wasn't wrong about Brennan not having skewered a doctor Voodoo-style way back in New Orleans, right? Right. So I'm trusting my gut but I know it's not rational except for a damn _fine_ track record which is all _I'm_ going on and she's ... standing there telling me that's all she needs.

Absolute faith.

In me.

In my 'gut' and what it tells me.

She said that a couple of weeks ago and aside from being relieved I didn't really think much about it. I thought maybe it meant she was reserving judgement or waiting for more facts before making a decision. The only reason we didn't break up (I've thought) was because she waits for evidence before she makes up her mind. I know I spent three months trying to tell her that I loved her but in hindsight, I really screwed up the physical evidence part.

What I got out of that conversation in our kitchen was that she decided to trust me.

But as this current argument between us unfolds I realize that I didn't get anything out of her kitchen confession.

I missed it entirely.

I tell her again that it's not rational for her to believe in Flynn's innocence just because I do.

She gets fierce. She demands to know why I don't hesitate and trust her about the science even when it appears she's made a mistake. I almost want to laugh. The last time I questioned her about bones, I think it was three years ago. A facial reconstruction matched the driving record of a 28 year old man, and Bones insisted the victim couldn't be over 20 years old. We argued.

She won.

Of course she won. She's all about bones, you know? I named her that for a reason!

That's it, I'm done. I mean, she's the expert, she's the genius. I know she's smarter than me (I've always known that), and when it comes to stuff she does in her lab it might as well be Voodoo as far as I can comprehend any of it. So that incident three years ago was the last time I ever questioned her expertise in the lab, 'cause she's just going to prove that she's right. (She's got a damn fine track record herself.)

So, here we are three years later, arguing in the bull pen with my genius poking me in the chest and reminding me that she has earned my undying trust when it comes to bone things because she's proven herself to me over and over until I just take it on faith that she's right. She's mad at me for not realizing she's done the same thing. That I've done the same thing.

She's just a little bit angry that Seeley Booth, man of faith, doesn't see her faith in me for what it is.

I'm an idiot...

(See what I mean? She 1000 times smarter than me.)

What she's telling me is that I've won battle after battle, proved myself to her and ... I won the war.

She believes in me with absolute faith.

She's mine. My Bones, my partner, my soul mate, _mine_. I've always felt like she was, always tried to hold back those little surges of protective ownership because she would insist it's some sort of primitive, alpha male dominance or something. I know that a person can't own another person, that she would object to my use of a possessive to her object (she is not my object to possess). She is free and independent, a rational scientist who looks for proof and when it comes to me, she has so much proof gathered up that she doesn't need any more.

Now she's mine ... because she gave herself to me. All of her love, her trust, her reason, her faith, it's mine. She's in my care, in my keeping. She believes me, believes _in_ me, trusts me, knows me, loves me, has _faith_.

I finally get it.

My heart swells until I want to cry, except that I also want to laugh. I want to crush her to me and growl out a victory roar. I want to dance. I want to sing. (Who am I kidding, I can't sing. But I want to.) What I feel is too big for words and I don't know how to tell her what I want her to know: how much I love her, how honored I am, how much I cherish everything she's given me. I can't even think anymore, I'm just feeling...

When I pull her to me, when I kiss her, it's for _her_. It's all for her, all of my love, my total adoration. It's tender, it's gentle, it's love. Worshiping her. We've been lovers for over two years but I've never kissed her like this. I'm making love to her, fully connected 100%. The two become one. I am one with her, we are one and it's pure joy and nearly divine bliss to love and be loved like this. I can never give her back enough but I'm trying by giving her everything I am right now.

She can feel the difference, I can feel it working in her, feel her feeling my love.

Our mouths move tenderly. I pour my love into her right here in the bull pen where it's gotten suspiciously quiet and I know there's an audience but I don't care.

I move my hand gently to her back, cradling her with care, telling her with my body and heart what my head has no words to say. I love her. I love her so much, so beautiful, so perfect, so precious, so gentle and strong, so brilliant and naïve, so maddening and passionate. My Bones, so much a part of me that I'm only complete when I'm with her. I never imagined I could feel this way, I never knew it was possible.

I want to be inside of her, I want her inside of me. I want to cherish and protect; I want to exalt and elevate and honor her.

The world disappears. There's only us, making love.

When I finally know she understands me, I draw away slowly. Though it only lasted a few seconds, this kiss is the best kiss of our lives, eclipsing even our first kiss (which was cataclysmic and passionate and erotic). This kiss is all the more powerful because it is none of that. Making love has nothing to do with sex and this moment is when I finally, truly experience it and come to realize she's known this all along. She's been waiting for _me_ to catch up. I understand what she means when she talks about parity. I understand what she means when she says commitment is not about a piece of paper. I understand now what she proposed when she asked me to marry her, what she was sacrificing for me. I understand her language at last. She has taught me how to love her.

She is stunned, stammering, blushing, just as deeply affected by our kiss as I am. "We ah ... agreed," she begins breathlessly, "to avoid public displays of affection at the FBI." And she laughs a little, amazed, buzzed, a little bit love drunk as my message sinks in.

"To hell with the FBI," I growl. I'm hers, too. I know she doesn't care where we kiss. That has always been my issue and another epiphany is hitting me: that over the last two years she has been willing to kiss me in her office, yes, but also at crime scenes and even in her sacred lab ... because she loves me with an equally overpowering intensity that can't be expressed in words so she kisses me with abandon whenever she feels it. And I'm only catching up to her now. But I'm here, FINALLY, right beside her, just as in love with her as I'm realizing she's been with me for a long time. We've reached parity, _her_ word, which I once dismissed as merely meaning a state of equality.

But there's another definition, a very scientific one that Bones probably had in mind when she talked about needing parity in a relationship. Scientific parity is not equal (which implies different): scientific parity means two entities that are _exactly the same_ but mirror images of each other. I look at Bones and I see my love reflecting back at me.

It is with no small amount of pride that I find I've rendered my genius partner nearly speechless. "I have to go ..." For a second she struggles to recover her wits and has to close her eyes and block me out, but in the end she prevails. "... do ..." (I smirk. Heh, she only partially prevails. Only _I_ have this effect on her.) "... scientific things, to catch a serial killer."

'Scientific things.' Ha! I've reduced her to a third grade vocabulary but her eyes are shining. She knows what that kiss really meant. Our love has reached parity.

* * *

**Author's Note:** There's another chapter (maybe two) from Brennan's POV coming that I hope to post within the next several days. Meanwhile, thank you for reading this one. :D


	2. Faith

**Author's Note:** Thank you to everyone reading and for the amazing reviews! Wow, it's humbling to have something I wasn't totally confident about to be received so enthusiastically! But it also freaks me out because then I start to worry about not living up to expectations. Perhaps I am neurotic ... success makes me nervous.

Still, I am plowing ahead because I have an agenda. I wrote in my previous author's note that this story was all about Brennan, but perhaps that is a bit misleading. It's about Brennan's feelings for Booth, why she feels that her faith in him is rational and how her faith in him leads her to make certain decisions. In other words, it's going to show you Booth through Brennan's eyes. I could go on all day but instead I'll just start connecting the dots (which I do well, I am told) and hopefully the picture of Parity (their mutual love and trust in each other) that I see will emerge for you all.

* * *

~Q~

**Faith:**

**1.** _(a)_ complete trust or confidence in someone or something.

_1. (b)_ firm belief in something for which there is no proof

**2**. strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.

**3.** something that is believed, especially with strong conviction.

~Q~

* * *

It was hard that first night, when Booth told her he thought they shouldn't get married. He gave her sound reasons, pointing out that her proposal had been impulsive, driven by fear, and reminding her that she'd never cared for the idea anyway. It was difficult to accept his logical points when in the grip of passionate disappointment that even Brennan herself knew wasn't rational. Yet this wasn't the first time Booth had redirected her from an emotion-driven declaration with the gentle explanation that she would agree with him once some time had passed and she was of a sounder mind, so she accepted his decision with as much dignity as a rapid retreat would allow.

The first night passed in mutual isolation and they slept rigidly beside each other, but in the morning Booth reached for her and uttered the next link in a long chain of reassuring whispers. He loved her, he was doing this for her.

Brennan lay beside him, still worried about what the refusal meant. "But you want to get married, Booth. You've said so."

He glanced away, and for the second time she'd noted his avoidance tactic as being precisely that (he wouldn't look at her last night either). "The only kind of wedding that would work for me is one that would go against your principles. I can't do that to you." Then he deliberately lifted his gaze back to hers, holding her steady while he reached out to touch her cheek tenderly. "We're gonna be fine, Bones. I love living with you. This is everything I hoped for already, just being with you like this."

It was reasonable and lovingly proffered and they made love and she told herself this was for the best. The last remnants of disappointment would fade and they would go on as before. She told herself it was irrational to let this change of mind make her doubt him when Booth was trying so hard to show her that his love was constant. For a week she believed he was right.

The only problem was a growing distance that started with his drifting gaze and over the next few weeks he drifted further and further away. He wouldn't look directly at her; he stopped touching her as they passed each other; their conversations dribbled down to mere drabbles of uncomfortable small talk. Before long he had to work late so they would have no time for drinks before dinner. Then he had to work even later so there was no time for dinner together, she and Christine should eat without him. Then he had a lead on Pelant so he wouldn't be home until very late, after she went to bed.

By the second month, she had reexamined Booth's reasonable reasons in the light of this new evidence and concluded his feelings for her had changed. That was why he sensibly avoided marriage. One's body would eventually develop a tolerance for the dopamine high of early romantic love and once it did, the feelings of euphoria fade. The average attraction cycle lasted four years, and theirs had been merely two, but perhaps his tendencies towards addiction were to blame for his rapid acclimation to dopamine.

Or, perhaps she simply wasn't enough to initiate a dopamine release in him.

An aching sensation had invaded her chest by this point, unrelenting and somehow visible to others. It must be, because everyone they worked with had begun asking her if she was 'okay' and she knew that she was perfectly healthy as far as physiology went but something was wrong with her nonetheless. Otherwise, Booth would still want to marry her.

There must be something wrong with her, otherwise Booth would still want to spend time with her.

As the third month drew to a close, Booth rarely came home except to shower and change, and always timed so that she wasn't there. They only saw each other at work, where all their interactions had become more than a little strained and he would tell her he loved her with a burning intensity so at odds with the physical distance spreading wide between them. He still responded to her when she called him or sent him texts; he still answered her emails, and at the end of every exchange he said, "I love you."

But he was always gone.

Then, one night, he didn't answer the phone. So she called back again. And again. And when he still didn't answer or call back she put Christine to bed alone. After she prepared for bed (still alone in their empty house), the hours rolled past and she sat on the edge of their empty bed looking down at her lost connection (his name in the contacts list, dark from disuse) with tears blurring her visual acuity.

Inside their closet, Brennan had a hand-carved teak wooden box that she had gotten in India when she was a grad student to replace the tattered shoebox that followed her through foster care. Inside she placed tiny treasures from her childhood that were small enough to take with her: a few photos; a magazine photo that she'd looked at the night she'd caught the bridal bouquet at Marianne's wedding; and a letter that she read the night Booth told her they shouldn't get married.

It was that letter that she went to retrieve now, finding it inside the box where it was resting underneath the little Brainy Smurf and Jasper figurines he'd given her, and her old skull key chain that reminded her of Booth rescuing her from Jamie Kenton. The letter was several years old, dirty, wrinkled. She'd read it many times, and had committed it to memory five years ago when she'd needed to read it repeatedly just to get through another day. Though she could have recited every word from memory, Brennan reached for the tangible record, needing it as the reminder that it was.

She read the lines, her lips moving to the tune of the words, her eyes closing at the end and though she told herself she believed it still, the words seemed fainter on the page. She opened her eyes again and looked down on the blurring ink (blurring because her tears had reached the paper before she could stop them and made the ink bleed and run away with the words).

It was proof of the past, but without the words, it was only empty paper. As she folded the letter and returned it to the box, Brennan asked no one in particular, "When does it become faith?"

~Q~

The next day he was apologetic, almost pleading. He invited her to lunch and she went only because both Cam and Hodgins prodded her to go. But as they sat at the counter, unable to connect and searching for a subject to discuss, Brennan found herself telling Booth about Christine in the same way she talked about Christine to her brother, the out-of-town relative.

And Booth had objected. "You're talking as if I'm not even there."

"It feels like you aren't there." She hesitated, knowing that what she had just said was entirely subjective and therefore somewhat false, but she had no other way to describe her perception of the situation. "Which I realize is a kind of illusion, but that's…." She paused again, considering perception as simply one facet of reality. Perhaps it was true precisely because it was subjective. "That's how it feels."

He tried again to reassure her, but by now the message had changed. Over the last weeks he had been telling her nothing was wrong; now, something was wrong but he wanted her to believe it was temporary. "Look, we're going to get past all this."

She wondered how he could not be aware of the abandonment that she would feel as his unexplained absences multiplied. He was avoiding her, and hiding something. Finally today he admitted things weren't right but the lack of information was proving too much to endure. "I … I don't even know what '_all of_ _this'_ **_is_**!" Her hand knocked her fork askew (just as askew as they were), causing a clumsy clatter that would make a scene and she didn't want to add public humiliation to the long list of things wrong between them. Brennan drew a deep breath to steady herself.

"Hey," he soothed, the way he always had before and had been doing quite in earnest for the last three months. "Hey, look. I love you, okay? You love me. Everything's going to be okay."

Something was very wrong, she knew, and her ability to keep believing what he told her was being sapped away with every day he spent avoiding her. "I know you want me to accept what you're saying on faith because you're a man of faith. But I believe in patterns and sequences, and this sequence doesn't end well unless something disrupts the pattern."

She was afraid.

He looked away. That was the first time she understood that he was afraid, too.

Arriving home that evening, Brennan found Booth's car in the driveway, Booth himself in the shower. His jacket was slung over the end of the bed and a pair of colorful business cards had dropped from the breast pocket onto the floor. She reached down for them, noting a bikini-clad woman lounging under a palm tree and the name of the business: Paradise Lost.

That ever-present pain in her thorax clenched more tightly still.

~Q~

The question of infidelity and dopamine tangled in her mind all through the next day and when she had shared her most recent findings with the Jeffersonian's Forensic Pathologist - a doctor, well versed in physiology and furthermore enmeshed in her own dopamine paradise - and who was turning to leave, Brennan found herself darting forward to catch Cam's attention.

"Given that you are still in the first year of your sexual relationship with Arastoo and so deeply in the grip of dopamine..."

A fleeting look of befuddled irritation was immediately chased away by sympathy. Cam stopped her, most likely thinking that Brennan knew no boundaries and was prone to asking any number of inappropriate questions. But what Cam revealed was that she knew what the question was already. "I know this is about Booth and my advice to you would be to trust him."

"I feel the intense feelings of our romantic love are fading from our relationship."

"Have you looked at Booth lately? He's miserable."

Brennan sighed. How could she look at him when he was never in her presence?

Cam continued, very gently. "If what you were suggesting were actually true, you'd both be experiencing relief. Do you feel relieved?"

No. She felt mostly a dispirited exhaustion that bordered on physically painful but naming the sensations she experienced so often eluded her that she admitted tiredly, "I don't always know _what_ I'm feeling."

"Well, you are not relieved, Doctor Brennan. You are miserable. And so is Booth. And _that_, is love."

No, Brennan thought with thorough confusion. How could love be misery (if that was the name for this)? It didn't make sense, she couldn't make sense of it. Giving up, she turned away from confusion and hid herself again in science that was comprehensible. "The blow to the victim's jaw took place approximately eight hours before his death, so I'm ... not sure they're related."

Letting her divert the discussion (knowing the advice would sink in so long as Brennan was given enough time to process it), Cam replied thoughtfully, "Doctor Hodgins found rose oil in the Band Aid."

"So he was struck with something made of leather?"

"Something made of really, really expensive leather..." Then she threw down the gauntlet in the form of the case file being handed back to Brennan. "I'd appreciate it if you passed this information on to Booth."

"No," Brennan objected. She needed time to think about what Cam had advised. "Why can't you do it?"

Like a patient parent, Cam smiled. "Because I'm asking _you_ to do it, please."

She spun briskly towards the door, leaving before Brennan could find a way out of the task even though Brennan's desperate protest should have been too difficult to ignore.

~Q~

Cam advised her to have faith in Booth.

For years she had maintained a certainty that what she felt for Booth could not be classified as 'faith.' The first time she'd argued against it, was with Hodgins while buried and gasping what they feared were final breaths. It was hot, humid, stale air and the cloying claustrophobia was escalating for them both. That narrowing of space and air was why she found the strength to plunge her pocket knife deep into the back seat repeatedly, stabbing over and over until she reached more of both in the trunk and then the last tiny stream of oxygenated air in the tire, after she'd rested long enough to recover from the previous effort.

They were slumped weakly against the tattered seat, breathing stale rubber-scented air gratefully while knowing the reprieve would be short lived. And their likely prognosis after that was dire.

"Booth will find us," she'd asserted with a confidence that she found quite reassuring.

"You have a lot of faith in Booth," Hodgins observed. It wasn't a tease, it was his own lack of faith asserting itself. As far as he could tell, they had run out of options, run out of time, and yet his extraordinarily rational coworker was clinging to a slender hope of one particular man coming to their rescue...

She shook her head so slowly the gesture was probably invisible. "No. Faith is an irrational belief in something that is logically impossible. Over time, I've seen what Booth can do. It's not faith." They'd sent Booth a message, Booth would take it to Zack and then he would come for her.

He'd done it before: He'd saved that little boy from South African mercenaries. He'd come to her aid in New Orleans (even after she told him not to), helping her clear her name and avoid a murder charge. But most tellingly, when she had no hope at all he'd saved her from the corrupt special agent, Jamie Kenton. As she'd stared into the tormented eyes of her would-be murderer, resigning herself to death, Booth's gun had announced his presence and Kenton fell away from her.

All of that history was why she knew it was possible that he could do it again now that they'd sent the text message, believed that he would try, hoped he would succeed. That wasn't faith.

Hodgins chuckled darkly. "No offense – and I'm not just saying this because you filleted me with a knife – We are out of air. We don't know if our message got out, much less if anyone understood it and we are buried underground. What you have is Faith, baby. ... Sorry. The baby thing is a reflex."

She stopped the dispute by suggesting they conserve air.

Hodgins, ever the scientific mind (like hers), might have won the point of contention or at least he'd succeeded in pointing out how slim were their chances of survival. She was too exhausted and terrified to pursue the topic any further and besides, a moment later Hodgins had begun to spark with an idea of how to make an oxygen scrubber. So they set to work and her wrestling with faith was temporarily set aside.

Believing in Booth's ability to reach her entailed not giving up until all possibilities of extending their survival (thereby giving Booth more time) had been exhausted. She and Hodgins had managed to squeeze out another hour from their combined efforts but that time was running down also. As Brennan contemplated packing the air bag explosives in a gamble that might either save them or kill them, Hodgins deliberately tore a blank page from the back of her book and handed it to her.

"Anyone you wanna say goodbye to?" His eyes held hers in silent challenge.

She took the paper, ever mindful of sand slipping through their hands, (dusty pale, tan-colored, bituminous coal-saturated sand) and knew that whatever she wrote would have to be quickly expressed. There wasn't enough time for her to linger. So she bent her head over the paper and blinked her stinging eyes when her hand (shaking more than a little) came down on the paper to write the last words anyone might ever hear (read) from her.

_Booth,_

_If these are the last words I'll ever write, it's fitting that I'm writing them on the pages of a book I never would have written if not for you. I wrote this book because of you and what you made me feel when we met. Yet you aren't Andy. I know you don't believe that but it's true and even though I don't have the time to explain, I really want you to understand. I thought up Andy as a correction for everything I told myself you lacked when I was so angry and hurt by what happened between us. I know that doesn't sound right but I don't have time to say this the way that I want to._

_Eloquence takes time and we don't have much left._

_You're better than Andy. You're braver, kinder, more patient. I don't care that you don't speak six languages and never went to an Ivy League school. The only thing I care about now is the fact that I didn't get more time with you. And I wish that I had been brave enough to tell you all of this when I had the chance._

_Hodgins says he loves Angela (will you tell her? and give her his note) and I didn't say anything about loving you because I wasn't sure then. It was only two hours ago but somehow, knowing I'll never get the chance to tell you what I feel is bringing on a case of angina. I know you're going to complain about me using big words so let me repeat it so you understand me: my heart hurts because I probably won't get a chance to tell you what I feel. What I feel, Booth, is safety when you're near. I feel comforted. I feel happy, even when we're talking about death or having one of our arguments. I want to be with you all of the time. I like it when you touch me and when you tease me until I laugh. I like to look at you and listen to you and learn from you. I want you to be safe and happy, too. I want to take care of you when you're hurt. I want to protect you. I want you to know how grateful I am to have you in my life._

_Is that love? (I don't know.) I don't want to tell you I love you and have it not be true.  
_

_But what if it all these feelings I have for you are love?_

_If they are, then I love you, Booth. And you're better than Andy._

_That's what I want you to know, if these are the last words I ever get to write._

_Hodgins told me I have faith in you. I told him it isn't faith because I have evidence. You always help me, you always come for me. Even if you come too late this time, I'll die knowing you did your best. It's not faith because faith is something you can't know. I know you. Over and over your actions prove what kind of man you are, that you're good and__ compassionate and fundamentally __honest, and you always try to help me. And for me to acknowledge that is not faith._

_I don't know what my last words should be. Maybe just ... thank you._

_Thank you for being my friend and partner._

_All my love (as far as I understand it),_

_Temperance_

_But now that I finished, I realize that I want the last words I ever write to be these: Your Bones_

She traced her dirty fingertip over the last two words, a lump forming in her throat as tears pushed themselves out of her still stinging eyes and she folded the note quickly and stuffed it into her shirt, over her still beating heart. The thought of him reading it was not comforting, it was terrible because he would be handed this letter after it was taken off her body and maybe processed into evidence first. Maybe other people would read it first. She wanted to be able to tell him herself, privately, when the moment was right.

"You okay?" Hodgins asked quietly from his place in the back seat.

She nodded, unable to speak. And went back to work preparing the charges for detonation because she didn't have time to grieve.

When the charges were set and she had clambered back to sit beside Hodgins, Brennan was too focused on fighting the terror of blowing herself up to think about Booth. And when Hodgins told her it was a pleasure working with her, and they embraced, she was too resigned to that moment being the last of consciousness to think of Booth. And when they touched their wires together to blew the windows and the charges detonated, it was too loud and choked with dirt falling in through the broken windshield for her to think of anything but frantically clawing her way out of the back seat, dragging Jack Hodgins with her into a space that had gotten smaller, darker, more terrifying. And when she emerged through the broken glass, feeling cuts and scrapes from the stones she swam through, her air reserves were already being taxed and she didn't know how much further and she was losing her grip on Hodgins (who couldn't use his broken legs to propel himself) and the thought of failure when they were so close to success pressed in on all sides.

She clawed through the loosened soil with desperation and felt pain tearing at her fingers but to stop was to die in the interstitial space between buried and breathing. Don't stop, don't quit. Her arms flailed and her fingers smashed through rocks and clumps that caught under her nails and it hurt but she was too scared to stop. She lost track of 'up' as her feet lost contact with the car and she lost track of Jack Hodgins as her left hand slipped loose from his. The only reason she didn't cry was because she was too close to losing consciousness and with the last spark of energy she pushed her right hand further up while her left scrambled up through the soil surrounding her to try and join the frantic reach for up. UP. Because the only way to save him was to save herself and she was closer.

_UP._

Brennan clawed and climbed, felt a breeze kiss her hand that had suddenly broken through to an airy void and then ... a large hand suddenly grabbed hers and pulled her upwards so that she was no longer tearing up her fingertips. Her body was dragged through the pelting pebbles, someone hauling her upwards in seconds. Her head broke ground, her eyes blinking and she didn't know who it was with her yet, too blinded by dust and light and ringing ears and choking breaths of dusty, oxygenated air. Before her legs were free Brennan fell sideways, gasped, "Get Hodgins," and sensed her rescuer joining other rescuers now digging for her friend.

She closed her searing eyes, feeling the grit in them burning and churning out painful tears. Tinnitus from the confined explosion drowned out most noises but she heard hands digging through the dirt and voices calling out to tell Hodgins they were coming. Their frantic efforts caused an eruption of dust so Brennan tried to raise a filthy hand to block some of the free-floating dust from entering her lungs. Suffocating on the inhalation of too much dust because of her rescue after nearly suffocating on a lack of oxygen would truly be an irony.

As Hodgins was pulled free a couple of minutes later, Brennan lifted herself onto an elbow and saw that her rescuers were, in fact, her friends and the dusty hand that had tugged her free had belonged to Booth. He scuttled back to her the moment Hodgins was clear, meeting Brennan's eyes with a joyful laugh that she matched because her confidence in him was justified.

~Q~

After Hodgins had been loaded into a waiting ambulance with Angela in attendance, Booth returned to her side and knelt down beside her. "Come on, Bones, let's get you into the other ambulance."

The ambulance would be small, enclosed. They would strap her down on a gurney. She shook her head warily, wanting only to sleep somewhere large and open with plenty of lights on, but only _after_ a shower because she had been covered in the cold sweat of fear when undertaking the dusty swim to freedom and dust-drenched sweat made her feel filthy. "I want to go home."

"You need to be checked out," Booth insisted, reaching for her but she pulled out of his grasping hand this time, asserting herself to prove she was fully capable.

"I'm fine." But she hissed in discomfort when she tried to push herself up into a standing position, looking down with dismay to notice ragged, torn fingernails hanging loose from the nailbed, dripping with burgundy blood oozing over the pale brown dust that coated her hands. She'd had to claw through pebbles, rocks and dirt, scratching her way to the surface. Inexplicably, the sight of her damaged fingers proved her undoing and though she scrambled upwards on her own, wincing at the throbbing she'd only just now begun to notice, it was those insignificant injuries that forced out a gasping sob of frustration because her hope to just go home had been foiled by broken nails.

Crying over broken nails, so damn _girly_.

"Hey, Bones, it's okay."

Despite her filth she found herself pulled against him in an embrace that he somehow knew she needed and burying her dusty face in his shoulder helped conceal the fact that she was crying over something so trivial. He wrapped himself around her - she didn't think she'd ever been held tighter or more securely - so close that the paper folded up against her heart crackled and reminded her that it was there. What she wrote, why she wrote it, who she wrote it to and the fact that he was pressed up against her letter to him made her tense up. He must have sensed the paper, or else he sensed her stiffening as she realized what was pressed between them, but either way she knew that he was aware of something because of how his body stilled and after a brief pause his hands began rubbing soothing sweeps up and down her back.

"Just let them clean up your hands," Booth offered softly.

"No, I don't want to go. I'm going to need a tetanus shot and to have the avulsed nails repaired. It'll be hours in the emergency department and I just want to go home." Her voice broke again, betraying what she'd not effectively hidden from him anyway. "I don't know why I'm crying. It's not rational."

"Shhh, you don't have to be rational right now, okay?"

"Booth, I wrote you a letter." She didn't know why that particular admission had spilled out just at that moment, almost as if he'd given her permission to be irrational and the least rational thing she could imagine doing just then was to tell him what she'd written. Without thinking, she lifted her face upwards to burrow into his neck and press a kiss against his throat but Booth stiffened and pushed her back with a concerned furrowing of his brow.

"Okay," he said and sounded very unsure.

"I want you to have it." She started to reach for it.

He pulled her wrist down. And he looked nervous, uneasy, but also compassionate the way he sometimes looked at the families when he had to tell them a loved one had died. Brennan didn't know what that meant, that he would look at her in such a way. "Listen, I think it's too soon right now, okay? You're ... you've been through a lot and what seems like a good idea right now you might not think that in a couple of days. All right? So let's just ... get your hands fixed and take care of you. Something to eat, some sleep and, if you still want me to have that letter in a couple of days you give it to me then. Okay?"

Gently guiding her towards the waiting ambulance, Booth kept his arm around her, holding her close to his side and she let her head rest against him as she stumbled forward. "You said I don't have to be rational," she complained, quite certain he'd just given her very rational advice that contradicted what he'd told her so reassuringly only a moment before.

"I just want you to hang on to that letter for a couple of days, that's all. After that, it's completely up to you. You can give it to me whenever you think it's the right time."

Of course, knowing her as well as he did, he was right that she would change her mind after she'd rested. She hesitated once the next morning arrived, her heart pounding out a novel sort of terror as she imagined him reading it. Brennan put the letter in her teak wood box instead.

Still the lingering sense of time wasted drove her and Brennan returned to the letter several times over the next few days. Despite her hesitation she made up her mind to tell him about two weeks after the rescue and took the letter with her to the lab. But then she saw Cam holding Booth's hand and she understood why he'd urged her not to give him the letter.

She understood why he'd pushed her away so gently when she'd started to kiss him.

Seeley Booth had never cheated on a woman he was with.

The right time never arrived and Brennan never gave him the letter because after things ended with Cam, Booth drew a line. Years passed. The letter yellowed slightly inside the box of mementos from her youth and from her partnership with Booth, waiting for a time that was right.

~Q~

It reassured her that Booth was home early but the sense of Paradise Lost was something she could not grasp. Going to her box of things remembered, Brennan sat with it to once again pull out the old letter, and set it down beside the Paradise Lost business card. They were evidence, tangible. One told her to hold on and another told her to let go. She opened the letter and read again the lines that had often reassured her when Booth's behavior had been upsetting or puzzling over the years.

_I know you. ____Over and over your actions prove what kind of man you are, that you're good and__ compassionate and fundamentally __honest, and you always try to help me. _And for me to acknowledge that is not faith.

But lately he'd grown so physically distant that she had nothing but the past to guide her. She recalled another conversation with Cam from several years ago, a debate over Cam's former lover. Cam had said, "We know people through our feelings, Dr. Brennan. You trust Booth because of what you feel."

And Brennan had argued, "No, I trust Booth because of past actions."

The one time she'd seen Booth inside a strip club, he'd been desperate to get out of there. She decided that Booth wouldn't go to a strip club, no matter what the image on the card showed. But it was in his pocket, so it was evidence that she could follow.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Thank you so much to all of you who are reading. :)


	3. Trust

**Author's Note:** Luckily I'd written most of this chapter before Monday because that amazing wedding completely threw a wrench into my angst-machine. I was too happy to work on this! So happy that I spent three days afterwards floundering with the end of this chapter trying to set the right tone of hopeful but not quite happy. All of which goes to show that my writing is very mood dependent.

* * *

~Q~

**Trust**:

**1.** _(a)_ to believe in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something

_1. (b)_ to allow someone to have, use, or look after (someone or something of importance or value) with confidence

_1. (e)_ to have faith, hope or confidence in someone or something

_1. (f)_ to place reliance on (luck, fate, or something else over which one has little control).

~Q~

* * *

Following the clue of the business cards, Brennan walked into Paradise Lost and saw that her impression of the place was wrong. It was a low-end sports bar, nearly devoid of paying customers or functioning televisions. The man behind the bar turned as a ringing bell heralded her entrance, regarding her with surprised dark eyes. "Oh, come on in..."

She wondered if his surprise was due to her gender, or to the fact that anyone had come through the door at all. He flicked a resigned glance around the males-only room and quirked an ironic grin. "It's ladies' night."

It didn't look like anyone's night, judging by the lack of customers in this hole-in-the-wall establishment so far off the main thoroughfares. "There are no ladies here," Brennan remarked with a raised brow. Except for herself, though she wondered what distinction this bar might make between a woman and a 'lady.'

"Uh, maybe you're the beginning of a trend," he hoped, just as wry as the crooked smile he greeted her with. There was a friendly, affable manner about him that set her at ease, a rather remarkable fact in itself as few people could dispose her towards them so effortlessly. Only Booth and Angela had won her over so instantaneously upon an initial meeting, and now this man whose name she did not yet know. "Wine?"

The offer was pleasantly prescient, as wine was her usual drink but in keeping with his little game, she took a seat at the bar and played along. "I ... I'll have the 'ladies' special.'" Whatever that might be.

He nodded and retrieved a brown bottle of something that faintly glugged into a 'low ball glass' and glanced down at her wallet that fell open when she was taking out her credit card. He noted her Jeffersonian ID clipped inside and looked back at her sharply.

"You're Booth's girl?"

The question, the very wording of it, caught her off guard. As if Booth owned her, as if this were a much older generation and she was the young 'girl' waiting for her soldier to return home from war. (Except, in some ways, that was indeed how she felt: that Booth had departed, leaving only a memory of his former self and she was stuck waiting for his return.)

"Temperance Brennan?"

That merely a glance at her workplace ID was enough for this man to link her to Booth suggested he knew Booth very well.

"I wouldn't use the term 'girl,'" she tossed back. The term was inaccurate due to her age, not to mention the sexist connotation that she was inexperienced, incapable and potentially property of a male by virtue of being female. She wanted no part of being any man's female (be it girl, woman, girlfriend or other gender-related term). She was herself: Temperance Brennan, scientist, author, mother, mate, and quite capable of taking care of herself.

And now she was more than just a little bit wary of this man who knew her, because she had no idea who he was.

"I'm Aldo Clemmons." He extended a warm, confident hand, evidently unbothered by her rebuff. "I used to be Booth's confessor when he was a Ranger. Me and him are having a tough time breaking the habit even though Booth's the reason I quit being a priest and decided God was my worst enemy."

It was so very forthright that Brennan was momentarily taken aback. Not many people blurted out truths like this man did: the truth about himself, about Booth, about their history. Almost as if he knew what she needed to know. But it was all very puzzling, the things he told her. When had a priest ever declared God to be his enemy?

"God is a myth," Brennan said, still processing everything else he'd said. It didn't make sense to be angry with a mythical being, yet he was. She could tell by the offhand bitterness as he'd finished up his sarcastic explanation.

Aldo disagreed quite conversationally. "No, I don't think so. I think he's a bastard." He plopped a small purple parasol made of tissue paper into her drink, stabbing it in at the word 'bastard' with a forceful emphasis and then pushed the drink her way. (The pretty little decoration was what distinguished what looked like ordinary Scotch from 'Ladies' Scotch,' Brennan decided. A pretty and yet ultimately useless decoration, which precisely matched what 'ladies' were in earlier times. She'd rather be a far more effective and useful 'woman.')

Leaving off any further internal rantings over ladies and uselessness, she considered what Aldo had just told her about her mate. Booth's confessions made Father Aldo Clemmons decide God was a bastard and leave the priesthood... She stared down into the gentrified drink, trying to understand what Booth would have confessed that would cause such anguish to his confessor.

"Booth was a sniper." Killing people on command. It bothered him, she knew that. "He asked for forgiveness from you every time he killed somebody?"

"Through me, technically. You can imagine why a guy might get soul-sick providing absolution."

She wasn't sure, wondered what Booth would have unburdened that would cause another man to give up his career. That was how she viewed it, since Aldo himself had affirmed he still believed a God existed ... but was too much a bastard to be worshiped. Intriguing thought, that one, but his comment about souls was another one to discard. "I don't believe in souls, either."

The pause when she completed that declaration was slight, yet profound. Had she said more than she'd realized or intended? It seemed so: Aldo spoke softly but with undeniable purpose. "Booth loves you."

How mere words could accelerate hearts was a mystery she had often pondered. Aldo's soft assurance had the power to quicken her pulse and give her hope (irrational as it was), and yet the timing and the context made her pause. With no clear reason why, Brennan felt it was her disbelief in souls that had brought this welcome statement forth yet she couldn't imagine why. How could love and the imagined vehicle of personhood and personality be linked in Aldo's cynical mind? "Booth told you that?"

Why would he?

Why did he come here?

Aldo confirmed, "He confessed it to me."

Why would Booth feel the need to confess loving her...?

A second later her thoughts changed direction because this former priest seemed to be violating confidentiality. Weren't priests supposed to keep confessions quiet? She thought so. Booth had told her this years ago, when her own father had masqueraded as a priest.

"Not being married is a sin to him." She knew that also; it was why she'd proposed when they feared Pelant was planning to kill him. She did not want Booth to die (at all!), nor to live with a fear of damnation hanging over his head. Aldo continued, "I'm not sure a nonbeliever can understand that kind of sacrifice."

Frustrated, Brennan stated the fact that Booth himself had spurned her offer. "I _wanted_ to marry him." Disregarding her own disdain for religion, Brennan had agreed to participate in the rituals Booth believed guarded his soul, and Christine's. Not being a believer did not mean she was entirely oblivious to the tenets of her partner's faith and when certain things mattered more than others, she was willing to go along with them to secure Booth's peace of mind. Thus she had rushed Christine's baptism when she knew she would have to turn fugitive and take Christine with her. Thus she had proposed, then offered him the Catholic ceremony that he needed to save his (imaginary) soul. She didn't believe it but Booth did and she wanted him to be happy. Yet Booth had ultimately declined and ever since then, they'd begun drifting further apart.

And she did not know why.

"Not as much as he wants to marry you," Aldo said softly. Meaningfully. He was telling her something that went deeper than the words he used. His eyes, direct like Angela's but warm like Booth's, drilled into hers.

Though it went against all rational sense, Brennan trusted him. Why? She didn't know him at all but when he said it, she knew it was true. Booth was happy those few hours before he said they shouldn't marry. Then he'd said, essentially, 'never-mind' and stayed with her but apart from her. Did his distance have something to do with his religion? She sighed, still bewildered yet tipping closer to a point of giving up on ever understanding what had happened.

This confessor was telling her something, a message as yet unclear when she needed clarity. "Do you want me to have faith in him?"

His response was to tell her something she already knew. "You know, I've seen Booth do some _terrible_ and ... and difficult things, but only if he was compelled by a very good reason."

Terrible and difficult things ... like not getting married when he wanted to...? Like not getting married even though he believed his soul was in jeopardy?

Icy dread spilled into her. Brennan plucked out the purple parasol and tossed back the drink, needing its burning heat to plunge into her core. Aldo watched her, eyes cynical as he assessed her tolerance from just that simple act of consumption.

"You're no stranger to the hard stuff yourself," he remarked.

There was a double meaning in it that, she supposed: hard decisions and hard drinking. Her glass clinked down. Brennan exhaled Scottish fumes, feeling the warmth eroding away the top layers of her tongue and blistering her esophagus all the way to the bottom. "I'll have another," she decided.

He complied, pouring another generous portion which she exchanged for her credit card. Turning to the point of sale terminal, he swiped her card and while waiting for the connection, glanced back at her almost casually. "You know what faith is, I assume."

"Belief without evidence." Impossible. Impossible for a scientist steeped in fact and evidence to believe something without some kind of proof to back her up.

"Why did you sit on that stool," he asked, the abrupt shift in topic catching her by surprise.

Startled, she looked down at the seat she'd taken: the faux leather seat cover, the large brass tacks that kept the cover in place, the scuffed legs and stretchers that supported the seat. Surreptitiously, she wiggled in place and noted a slight wobbling indicative of uneven legs (probably a felt pad had been lost from one of the feet) but aside from that her seat was sound. Looking back up from her impromptu inspection she found Aldo Clemmons standing near, proffering her credit card and an amused smile.

"Now you're looking for evidence, but before I mentioned it, you just sat down. Why is that, Temperance?"

A flush spread over her cheeks (which she blamed entirely on the Scotch) and she plucked her card out of his lax fingertips. "It's customary to take a seat at the bar. On a bar stool."

"Your previous experience with reliable bar stools in the past led you to place your faith in this bar stool that you've never encountered before. Was that a rational act?"

Was it?

She frowned, utterly flummoxed by the question.

It wasn't, strictly speaking. Before she sat on it she had no empirical data regarding this particular bar stool's construction and functionality.

On the other hand, it would be pathologically irrational to go around inspecting every piece of furniture she encountered looking for signs of instability; she had much more important things to investigate and better ways to spend her time than neurotically checking chairs before sitting in them. "It's rational to conclude that a business establishment would not contain unreliable seating else it risks injured customers, and lawsuits."

"Your experience leads you to the short-cut assumption that I run this establishment with such rational considerations in mind."

"Are you mocking me?" It didn't seem like it; he was nothing but sincere yet the message itself was nearly nonsensical.

"I can't afford lawsuits," he shrugged.

She didn't know what that meant. She glanced around the nearly-empty room and conceded he almost couldn't afford to stay in business, given the lack of paying customers. Taking up the glass he'd refilled, Brennan sipped at the Scotch, let the taste scorch her while she pondered his intended message. Finally, she concluded, "You are implying I've placed my faith in a bar stool." It was laughable.

"Every time you board a plane, you put faith in a number of things that are beyond your control," he replied in lieu of an outright agreement. "That the plane is functional and properly maintained; that the pilot is fully trained, rested, healthy and sober; that the airline and airport are ensuring basic standards of safety. You have no opportunity to investigate these assumptions yourself, yet you take it on faith that the flight will safely deliver you to your desired destination."

He leaned forward, catching her eyes with an intensity that unnerved her. "You have more information about Booth at your disposal than you do about that bar stool you're trusting to hold you up."

Their eyes held for a moment longer. "Or any plane you've ever boarded."

~Q~

More information about Booth...

She drove home thinking about that, gathering anecdotes as evidence despite the fact that anecdotes were considered logical fallacies in the context of a broader philosophical debate. One could not discount the harmful effects of smoking just because one's great aunt Tilly smoked three packs a day and lived to 103. On the other hand, the collection of stories about one particular man might illuminate rather than obscure the issue in contention: should she simply trust Booth?

What did she know about his past and the terrible things he'd done (for good reasons)?

So many things...

She knew why he left the Army and joined the FBI.

They'd been arguing about small towns. (Actually, they'd been arguing about absolutely everything the entire five hour flight plus two hour drive to tiny Aurora, Washington.) So they were still arguing when the car pulled to a stop and, having finally arrived, Booth got out to stretch and expansively proclaim the virtues of "small town America" as something one has to love. Not to be outdone (this fight wasn't over yet), she'd insisted a small town was like Chuntala in Guatemala, with a population of 150 - not Aurora's 350 - and no running water. His rebuttal that small town America was not comparable to small town Guatemala went unchallenged because a breath later he revealed he'd actually been to Guatemala.

It changed everything for her, a radical shift in paradigm as pieces of his past fell into place. She couldn't stop the curiosity, or the never-ending conflict between them in the form of a snide remark. "What took you to Guatemala? Eco-tourism?"

He was walking away, but at the taunt he stopped to pin her with a cold stare, the coldest wash of barely restrained ... _something_ ... she'd ever seen in him. Stepping towards her, Booth spit out, "I went down to shoot somebody through the heart from 1500 feet."

Their eyes held, even through his dark glasses, freezing her blood with suspicion and then he turned away. Booth walked away, leaving her with questions that churned like acid under her consciousness. He'd been to Guatemala (doubtless after 1990 given his age) to shoot somebody.

The case kept them busy over the next hours, so it wasn't until the following evening (after he rescued her from a line-up of dancing suspects hinting for something more than a dance) that Brennan felt she could ask him. They were settled at a small table in the back of the pub, Booth's domineering presence having effectively warded off the delivery man, local sheriff and local doctor and after their initial dance that he'd successfully led her in, they'd relaxed together over drinks and free-flowing chatter.

It felt nice, unguarded and even friendly...

...Until a lull in the conversation drifted lazily between them, giving her thoughts time to begin churning again. Brennan watched Booth's aquiline eyes taking in his surroundings, the alert way he never quite relaxed, and replayed what he'd said about Guatemala. How those eagle eyes would have narrowed onto a target just under half a kilometer away, and how the sturdy second distal phalanx of his right hand would have moved medially, curling in towards the midline and taking the trigger with it. One tiny twitch that ended a life.

"Who did you kill?"

One tiny question that ended a mood.

He wasn't relaxed any longer: in an instant she had touched one of their two forbidden topics. (The other being ... _them_, their beginning and their near-ending, which he didn't realize had something to do with the question she'd just asked him but she, just in that moment, had come to understand that it had everything to do with why she'd hit him.)

"What?" The change of inflection suggested not so much a question as a warning.

"In Guatemala." Brennan watched his face become frozen, a somewhat clear signal that he had no desire to talk about it (even to her it was clear) but she had fallen prey to a compelling need to know ever since he'd said it. If he didn't want to talk about it, he shouldn't have brought it up in the first place when he knew who she was, what she did. When he knew her thirst for truth would not be quenched until she got him to spill the story he wanted to withhold. "Who did you shoot from 1500 feet?"

"That's classified information." He glanced away, eyes climbing the wall, indicating the topic closed as far as he was concerned.

"Convenient," she muttered.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

It meant the topic wasn't closed for her, it could never be closed. She pushed her drink away as the beer she'd consumed fizzed unpleasantly enough to make her regret having drunk anything at all. Was it intoxication that loosened her tongue, or distrust. "Why did you kill him?"

His rapidly darkening countenance suggested disbelief and rapidly escalating defensiveness. "It wasn't personal. I was sent there to take out a specific person, for a specific reason."

"But _why_?" she persisted. "What reason?"

"Why the hell are you asking me this," he rumbled dangerously.

Why? She heard a rushing sound of blood roaring in her head, a torrent of bloody facts tumbling in her mind and spilling out of her mouth before she could think better of it. "Between 1978 and 1996, estimates are that over 200,000 Mayans were systematically slaughtered by the Guatemalan army, acting on direct orders by the government. Children were ripped from the arms of their parents, their heads smashed against rocks. Or they were raped, impaled and thrown into wells. The women were raped and impaled or eviscerated, then left to die of their injuries. Our own CIA was well aware of the genocide but didn't stop it because the Mayans were considered sympathetic to the leftist insurgents who were challenging the government. When trials for crimes against humanity were finally started after 1996, people who spoke out against the perpetrators of the genocide were targeted and killed."

It was noisy in the bar, but starkly silent at their table.

With her heart pounding, a sick fear coiling, she waited for Booth to understand. Their eyes locked and wrestled as her implied accusation heated the air between them but he didn't take offense. Instead he seemed to look right through her and wage a war within himself, his hands clenching involuntarily on the table.

She could tell he wanted to dismiss what she'd said. "That's a corrupt government."

"Governments who abuse their authority use soldiers to do it."

He hissed as if burned and leaned forward, his eyes turning black with fury. "What are you saying?"

"I'm the one who digs up the bodies that men like you put in the ground."

He unleashed an epithet that was capable of stripping varnish off the table as he jumped up so fast that his chair fell backwards and they stared at each other in mutual shock. It wasn't what she'd meant to say. Well, it was—soldiers murdered citizens, that was the crime she unearthed in places like Guatemala, El Salvador, Iraq—but she hadn't meant to imply Booth had done so. The flash of agony in his eyes, the crash of the chair, the sudden silence in the busy bar all added to the pain of unintentionally puncturing old wounds. His, and hers.

The falling chair had drawn attention and it was that, plus the sight of Sheriff Scutter coming towards them, that shook her into an impulsive apology.

"I'm sorry," she gasped, knowing it probably wouldn't be enough yet it was all she could manage. "I didn't mean you."

Scutter was getting closer. A belated kick of adrenaline caused her hand to twitch just a little when she executed a gesture intended to ward him off. Booth watched her send rescue away, and perhaps it was that small motion of trust that caused him to pick up his chair and sit back down.

"You have no filter, Temperance. You just say things and never stop to think about how it's going to sound." And he was shaking, too, angry and picking up steam.

She wasn't listening to his lecture because her mind was spinning in torment. After 1990 ... but was it also after the trials that began in 1996? The window of harm was opened, letting a cold wind blow and she shivered. The icy wind brought out tears and another question. "Did you shoot an informant?"

It stopped his tirade mid-sentence.

Booth's eyes widened, for a moment she thought he was going to take offense again, but then something seemed to click. "Is that how you see me? As a government assassin?"

"Former," she said, granting him that reprieve at least. "But yes. Isn't that exactly what you did? They told you who to shoot and you shot them."

So blunt, so raw and accusatory. So right that it made him flinch. "I do not enjoy killing, okay? I do it when it needs to be done. Every shot I made was ordered from a higher authority."

"They all say that," she countered fiercely. Furiously. "They flash their badge, wave their gun, and say the government gave them _permission_. Right before they kill you."

"_'A bully with a badge and a gun?'_" All that anger that she'd ignited in him seemed to soften when he repeated her words. That's what she'd called him during their violent altercation in the Hoover and what she'd said now certainly must have revealed too much because Booth asked her, almost gently, "What did they do to you?"

Soldiers with guns in Guatemala, brandishing them over the forensic team unearthing a mass grave. Police in El Salvador, where she'd spent three days in the dark while a police officer tormented her. Civilians killed, women raped, it cycled in on itself in a repeating loop and he was a link in the chain: a man with a gun and government authority.

"They tried to stop me," she told him, shaking from the terrifying memories. They'd tried to stop her from reaching for justice: the only thing she could try to offer for those poor murdered and erased people, the only thing she'd ever wanted for herself.

"Why are you different than them?" She needed him to answer, to give her proof of good intentions. Otherwise, he was just a soldier and soldiers were dangerous.

Terrifying.

Deadly.

"I have never hurt a civilian," he defended, his own fury rising again to meet hers, but it was twisted by a growing comprehension of what was driving her. That she didn't trust soldiers or cops (and for good reason) was the truth that twisted his wrath in a new direction.

"But you would, if ordered to?"

The crux of the matter.

Would he?

Brennan felt barely suppressed fears trying to work their way out of her because she didn't want to believe he would. He seemed nice but maybe they were all nice in a way, before they picked up bayonets, machetes, and rifles, and started using them. Maybe one of the men who dashed a baby's skull against a rock as the mother screamed went home to kiss his own baby good night. That dichotomy was something she had seen up close, the kind/cruel blade that flipped and flashed in the light.

All humans were capable of mind-bending cruelty given the right circumstances. Weren't they...?

"No, I wouldn't." He held her gaze, his sable eyes flickering with hidden regrets. "That's why I left the army, because an army sniper is the government's left hand. I want to work for the right hand."

~Q~

In the intervening months, little by little, Booth dropped hints and small details of his missions as a sniper. She learned about the isolation and extreme risk he and his spotter endured; the cunning and patience required; the impact of the bullet and the way it penetrated Booth's conscience almost as deeply as the body receiving the hit. She would eventually learn that certain shots haunted him even years later, and that he'd depended upon his government and commanding officers to give him noble targets.

Because he'd done terrible things, like shoot a father at his son's seventh birthday party...

_"I've seen Booth do some **terrible** and ... and difficult things, but only if he was compelled by a very good reason."_

...Because that night, the Serbian father was planning to raid another ethnic Albanian village where every single man, woman and child would be shot, maimed and burned.

And then she knew it was Booth's terrible shot that stopped one of those evil soldiers that populated Brennan's nightmares and stopped one of the holocausts she had to unearth. Booth was a good man.

~Q~

And the logic of it finally was settled:

Good men only did terrible things when there was a compelling reason.  
Good men suffered regret when they had to do terrible things.  
Good men searched for absolution when they had to do terrible things.  
Booth was a good man.  
Booth had done a terrible thing.  
Booth went to Aldo seeking absolution.

Ergo, there must be a good reason.

* * *

**Author's Note:** There is will be two chapters after this. Because the last one will contain major spoilers for Secret in the Sacrifice, I'll try to end chapter four on a satisfying note. That way people who haven't seen Secret in the Sacrifice yet will be able to avoid having major plot points revealed.

Thanks to everyone reading, thanks for watching (following?), thanks for making this a favorite, and thanks for reviews. I'm always pleasantly amazed when people like what I write. :D


	4. Absolute

**Author's Note:** For my foreign readers who still haven't watched the Sense in the Sacrifice, this chapter is the last stopping point before major (mystery-busting) spoilers are revealed. Normally I don't give away any of the main case details in my stories without a warning in the summary, but it turns out the next chapter requires it. So while I would love to see you continue, I understand if you don't want to have too much of the mystery revealed. Hopefully the end of this chapter will leave you satisfied.

For the rest of you, the next chapter will be the end. Probably. (Unless I get too wordy and have to break it up into two chapters.)

To all of you lovely readers, thanks so much for sticking with me. I still owe quite a few thank you notes which I'm working on today.

* * *

~Q~

**Absolute:**

**1**. not qualified or diminished in any way; total.

**2**. viewed or existing independently and not in relation to other things; not relative or comparative.

~Q~

* * *

~Q~

Booth's good reasons were usually well hid behind high fortress walls.

Angela occasionally made acerbic remarks about Brennan's walls which were obvious to all, but Brennan's walls also contained doors and windows that could be opened with the right key. Angela was born with a key in her hand; Booth forged one out of stray materials laying around. No one mentioned Booth's walls, because they were so expertly camouflaged that they were for all practical purposes invisible. Brennan didn't even know Booth had walls until she ran into them face first (metaphorically). There were several: his sex life; Parker; his alcoholic father; his missing mother; his time in the military.

It was a bit unfair to be taken to task for walls she openly advertised with warnings and keep-out signs (for good reason) and yet Booth's hidden reserves merited no mention at all (because no one knew he had something hidden, she supposed). For all the grumbling she might have indulged, instead Brennan acknowledged another truth that only she seemed to know. Whenever she ran face first into a hidden obstacle and was knocked flat by the barrier, it was always Booth himself who picked her up and deposited her inside his invisible wall.

The first one was the hardest, and later she would wonder if the reason he brought her in was one of guilt. She smashed up against it again and again, sensing its existence via the bruises of repeated collisions and maybe he was just tired of the two of them getting hurt. Maybe that was why Booth set her inside the circle.

What it would take her years to understand, was the fact that in a graveyard one afternoon Booth had picked her up and placed her somewhere deep within the innermost ring, the most sacred space behind the first wall. He placed her somewhere only one other person was ever allowed to go, and that was his confessor, Aldo Clemmons.

It was always a source of tension between them during their first year, that first wall.

"Harold will know where that vault is," Booth remarked a month before the day in the graveyard. They were driving away from the detention center where a homeless and emotionally damaged veteran was admitting to being responsible for a death, but only in the sense of giving their victim information that had gotten her killed: the key to a treasure. Harold knew where a hidden vault of priceless heritage items was located but refused to disclose it on the grounds that he would not be responsible for further deaths.

That was because Harold was a troubled man who'd admitted to guilt over his actions as a soldier (even though, as Brennan understood them in both the context of war and the culture they inhabited, Harold's actions were justified and legal). In that he was similar to Booth, who also seemed haunted over things he'd done despite the legal sanctions that made it not a crime to be a military or police sniper.

Why couldn't one guilty soldier disclose uncomfortable things to another...? So Brennan suggested, "Hey, maybe you could try the '_Hey, we're brothers in arms_' thing on him."

And that was always how it happened, always the way she ran full tilt into a wall she couldn't see.

A micro-second of chilled silence (like the aching cold of a blizzard about to blow in), and then Booth spoke.

"Okay. _That_, what you just said right there, Bones, that was cynical."

He was angry, cold and disapproving, the way he often got with her when she committed a social sin. She must have done so now, based on the cold reception her suggestion received. He repeated, "It was glib, and cynical."

"Really?" Brennan didn't understand why doing what she'd proposed would be either glib or cynical, and his harsh disapproval was disconcerting. The word 'glib' implied she didn't care and nothing could be further from the truth: she did care about Booth, but also about Harold and the victim who's death she was trying to explain. Or, maybe Booth was reacting this way because what she'd suggested implied that _he_ didn't care. It was neither what she'd meant nor what she thought, but Booth misunderstood her so often that she should be used to it by now. They were always at cross purposes despite their one shared goal (most disagreements were rooted in the way to reach the goal) and this was just another example of how confusing Booth could be.

Confusing, because there could be no denying the fact that Booth himself did tend strongly towards cynicism. He expected the worst from suspects and often manipulated them mercilessly in pursuit of the truth. (It was one more thing they'd argued over, strenuously, until she'd begun to see how many lies his manipulations uncovered, results that justified his actions.) Given Booth's past performances in interrogations therefore, Brennan didn't understand why this situation with Harold was different.

"Yes. Really."

That seemed the end of it. Brennan sighed, settling back in her seat to wonder in silence when abruptly Booth revealed why he wouldn't do it this time. It wouldn't be a cynical ploy.

"I know what that guy has been through."

"You killed a pregnant woman who was holding a child?" Though she should realize by now not to take things so literally, Brennan sensed what Booth had experienced was something too close to what Harold had revealed. (Harold had shot a pregnant woman who was holding both a child and a live grenade; but in the process of saving five soldiers, an innocent child and fetus had died.) In the military it was called _collateral damage_, literally 'damage on the side,' the unintended byproduct of the main objective. Civilians injured or killed. Booth had assured her months ago that he'd never harmed a civilian, but now she wondered if he meant never as a primary objective.

As collateral damage, it might be a different story.

Her heart clenched again, a mix of horror and dread, but tempered by his reaction when she looked at him.

His masseter tensed (pulling his mandible up tight against his maxilla with teeth grinding in between), a flicker of darkness visible in his stony, forward stare. "Look, if you really want to know what I've done, I'll tell you. But you'd better be ready for the truth."

If she asked it would be like running at that camouflaged wall again, only this time at full speed and with the full knowledge that a wall was there. For the first time, she realized her collisions were hurting him, too. So she looked away.

"Good choice, Bones."

It was another month before he told her what had happened, not because she was ready to hear the truth, but because he was finally ready to tell it. That was the day he set her down inside the wall, deep within the innermost circle.

~Q~

Still driving home from Aldo's Paradise Lost, Brennan considered her options.

If she embraced the premise that Booth had a good reason for his actions, then there remained little else she could do but to make a conscious decision to stop seeking an explanation. (Stop running up against the wall.) That did not alter the fact that Booth had been staying away, however; nor did it assure her that anything would change in that regard even if she did tell him the conclusion she had drawn tonight, because she still didn't know what had kept him distant.

She didn't know where that sudden new wall had come from.

Was he trying to protect her from something?

Was he being consumed by guilt?

Was he being threatened?

Was he avoiding her so she would have no opportunity to press him for answers he couldn't give...?

At a red stop light, Brennan embraced the signal to stop and shook her head at the thoughts wandering up against the wall she had decided to avoid. In the past, Booth brought her inside when he was ready and he would do it again. She just had to wait, just had to let him know she was being patient and would stop fighting the wall she couldn't see.

But how could she do that when she tended to misspeak so often...

~Q~

_"The way to a man's heart is through his stomach."_ An old adage that, as improbable as it seemed, had first been voiced by an amused Angela when she heard about the now infamous Mac & Cheese dinner Brennan had cooked for Booth all those years ago. After taking his first bite, Booth had closed his eyes blissfully and declared he wanted to be alone with it, a puzzling statement that Brennan had reported to Angela the next day in hope of clarification. Instead, Angela herself said something nearly as nonsensical.

Shaking her head in dismay at the woeful lack of even the most basic anatomical knowledge, Brennan had corrected her. "No, Angela, the esophagus runs past the heart and empties into the stomach..."

Angela's expression registered amused patience, accompanied by a slight shake of the head, all of which caused Brennan to trail off. "Oh, you're speaking metaphorically..."

Of course.

Angela knew anatomy quite well, given she was a forensic artist frequently called upon to utilize anatomy when she recreated faces, wound tracks, injuries, and disease processes.

"The way to get a man to fall in love with you is to cook him a meal he can't get anywhere else." And she winked, leaving Brennan baffled once again.

"I don't want Booth to fall in love with me!"

Said a little too defensively, arms crossed and a dash of guilt, all she managed to do was make Angela laugh and walk away. "When you change your mind, come and ask me. I've got recipes that will leave him begging for more."

"More food?"

"More of _you_ and what you can do for him."

Completely unable to see the connection that Angela seemed to be implying between food ... and sex...? Brennan asked doubtfully, "Food will make a man want me?"

With all the patience of an older sister, Angela tugged Brennan into a seat by the large windows where the natural light was brightest. "Sweetie, men are just like us. They want to be taken care of."

"I don't want to be taken care of," Brennan protested.

"Yes you do," Angela countered. "When Booth does little things that show he's thinking of you and what you need, it gets to you."

"It annoys me."

"You let him hold doors for you."

"I don't have a choice!" Which was true. Booth had chastised her for barreling ahead so often that by now it was assumed 'gun goes first' and she had to let him lead by virtue of the fact that he had the gun. (There was a phallic metaphor hiding somewhere in that thought but she refused to say anything out loud for fear of Angela pouncing on it.) Instead, Brennan reminded herself that the FBI, for reasons illogical and unfair (that man she shot was trying to destroy evidence and set her on fire!), had denied her a gun and therefore Booth's insistence upon getting to a door first, while annoying, had some merit.

On the other hand, that didn't explain why his large and gunless palm often ended up splayed warmly against her back as he guided her (unnecessarily, as though she were somewhat incapable of navigating herself) through a door that he'd just opened. Brennan sighed, knowing it was old-fashioned courtly behavior drilled into him by his grandfather and that despite how little she liked the implication of the act, an answering echo of her own femininity found it endearing. She liked it when he touched her so she allowed it, all of which proved Angela wrong.

She let him hold doors because he touched her while she walked through, not because she wanted him to take care of her. When she explained this to Angela, however, her friend merely laughed. "There's a phrase for that: splitting hairs."

Brennan wondered why would anyone bother splitting a hair? Perhaps the very pointlessness of such an endeavor was the point Angela was trying to make: to wonder why Brennan would bother to defend such a slim difference in her motive. The result, ultimately, was the same.

Partners took care of one another.

Arriving home with the wisps of that ancient conversation whispering a course of action, Brennan started pulling pots out of cupboards and heated up the oven. The way to Booth's heart, mind and attention had often been through his stomach. She chuckled slightly at the thought, for while it was still impossible, in Booth's case it was also undeniably the truth.

Booth had always operated in ways that confounded her.

~Q~

The first wall was the hardest, and the last time she smashed into it was near the end of their first year of partnership. Booth's past in the military caused him to lose objectivity when a veteran appeared to be a protestor who'd sacrificed himself on a fellow soldier's grave. The desecration pushed him deep inside the innermost circle and Brennan slammed up against the hidden barrier again and again on that case, again and again until they were both bludgeoned and gasping for a reprieve from each other.

She'd even stooped to pleading. "I'm your partner. Let me _be_ your partner."

Again and again, until a truth cracked loose and Booth saw that her quest to desecrate the grave of one soldier was predicated upon her passion to exonerate another soldier. When he saw that his wall was getting in her way, Booth lifted her over it.

"I've done some things."

She had learned not to ask. She had learned to walk away from the no-longer hidden wall. (It was marred now by her constant collisions that broke off the camouflage.) "I know."

"No. No, you don't."

"But it's okay," she insisted. Maybe she didn't want to know, just like he'd said. Brennan swallowed nervously, sensing he was going to bring her in and she wasn't sure how to respond.

"Well, not ... not as a secret, it's not." The government's left hand did things in secret, which was why he'd left that side and gone to the right. Booth sank down onto an abandoned chair at the site of their exonerated victim's funeral. "I have to be, uh, honest about myself. I have to be able to tell someone." He chanced a glance at her, looking up in time to watch her sink down beside him.

"You will in time, Booth." Maybe a part of her hoped it would be a different time, because she was suddenly terrified of making an improper response. What if she said the wrong thing again? Wasn't it enough that she knew the wall was there. If he knew she no longer needed to know what was behind it, would that be enough to comfort him? "You will."

He spoke softly, his voice catching on a narrative that answered her earliest accusations when she'd questioned what kind of person his government had sent him to kill. "I was sent to Kosovo. There was this Serb, General Raddick, who led a unit that would go into villages and, you know, destroy 'em. Women, children, all ... all killed because he wanted to ethnically purify his country. He'd done this twice before. I mean, we had facts, proof. 232 people just erased."

And she would know this, having been to Kosovo herself, after the fact. She knew this, having been the one to extract them from piles at the bottom of karstic caves and muddy pits dug into the countryside.

Brennan waited silently, letting him speak, but the story was too familiar to stop her own tears from starting.

"I was the sniper sent in to stop him. He was set to leave in a couple hours. It was his son's..." and Booth halted again.

She thought of Booth's little son, Parker. Was he thinking of Parker, too?

"...his son's birthday. A little boy maybe about six or seven. I can still hear the music from the party, you know? That song just playing in my head."

Brennan closed her eyes, picturing the party, with decorations and children running, kids close to Parker's size (slightly larger but just as innocent and care-free at a birthday party with the promise of cake).

"Nobody knew where the shot came from, but, you know, they knew why it came."

Because a sniper had stalked an evil father named Raddick from half a mile away, and the finger twitched and ended a life. But no, closer than that if he could hear the music. Close enough to see the blood spray over the guests when he pulled his eagle eyes away from the scope. Brennan shivered in the breeze that blew around him.

"They said I saved over a hundred people."

He did, and from a horror that went beyond what words could convey. The screaming as they are dragged from their homes and loved ones pulled out of their arms. The crackle of gunshots in the night. The rapes. She breathed heavily, feeling herself deposited into a circle of tightly coiled grief for all the people she tried to name.

"But, you know, that little boy who didn't know who his father was, who - who just loved him... He saw him die, fall to the ground right in front of him. That little boy all covered in his daddy's blood was changed forever." And then she experienced the other side of the wall where he'd set her down so gently: Booth's grief for an innocent child's devastating loss, because often those evil soldiers had their own children that they loved and kissed good night before they went out to kill. A boy like Parker and a father like Booth, a soldier doing what he was ordered to do. Her throat closed up tightly, pinching off words. There was nothing she could say anyway.

Booth sighed, exhausted and world weary. "It's never just... It's never just the one person who dies, Bones. Never. Never."

Never just one life destroyed. This was the collateral damage, his link to Harold. Tears are an involuntary response to strong emotions, both happiness and sorrow, sometimes anger and fear. Tears were in Booth's eyes and in hers. Through her tears Brennan reached for him, wanting him to know she was still there.

His hand covered hers, and that was how he lifted her over the wall. Booth's thumb brushed across her metacarpals, an absentminded gesture he probably wasn't aware of. "You know, we all die a little bit, Bones. With each shot, we all die a little bit."

But Booth's shot had saved a hundred lives and all the agony and grief of another mass grave in Kosovo.

_"I'm the one who digs up the bodies that men like you put in the ground."_

An unfair comparison.

An accusation when what he needed was reassurance.

There were too many things to say and with her history of offending him at the worst possible moments, she didn't trust herself to say anything. She would have to do something instead. It was one of the most impulsive things she'd ever done, but Brennan had long known her own proclivity for rash, impetuous action. Acting fast before reason could dissuade her, she leaned forward and pressed her mouth softly against his. Warm, soft contact, a flush of heat and a thrill of excitement sizzled like a lit fuse.

Before the inferno could engulf them (she felt the flame licking near to barely banked fires) she pulled back and saw his stunned expression.

"What was that for?"

"I..." _have no words_, her brain teased, because she'd kissed him and that ensured minimal processing power for at least another hour. But at least she could manage to give him the reason for the risk she'd taken. "Thank you."

"You're thanking me...?"

He didn't understand. Brennan lifted her palm to cradle his cheek so she could show him with touch what it meant to her. "I know what you did," she assured him tenderly, her eyes holding his. What he did in Kosovo and why, but also what he did just now in telling her. Her finger traced over the track of a tear. "Booth ... thank you."

Booth pulled her closer, his arms going around and his face buried into her neck as if shamed but she wouldn't let him hide here inside the wall. Brennan pulled him back, lifting his head and her lips clung to his again, connecting them and reassuring him that he was a man she was willing to be with. The same man she'd offered herself to behind a pool hall. A good man.

He had flaws but he was working on them and he trusted her to know him. He'd brought her inside another wall.

The intoxicating slide of his lips on hers, the parting, the entry. It felt like falling as her belly plunged and swirled and her pulse exploded and his hot breath engulfed her. Falling into him again.

"Bones," he groaned. His lips plucked reluctantly at hers, pulling further apart at the end of each pass while she determinedly followed and pushed them back together. For another endless span he gave in, his lips melding with hers in dizzying passes of friction and heat. When he tried to stop them a second time she refused to relent, returning to him like a reflex.

"Bones, no." Firmer this time, as if he were more invested in stopping than she was. And yet Booth slid his hand against the back of her occipital and palmed her head backwards so he could level her with one last, volcanic kiss. Mouth grinding, tongue plunging, his body dominating hers for one glorious moment during which she willingly surrendered.

Then he was pushing her away, breathing hard. "We can't do this."

A biochemical storm raged throughout her limbic system, shutting down everything but the most primal of desires: anything to be with him. But he was saying no and it gave her pre-frontal cortex a chance to belatedly reassert itself, reminding her of why she'd wisely pulled away at first, during that first kiss a few minutes ago. "Because we work together."

She sounded calmer than she felt.

"Yeah."

Hopefully, her hypothalamus offered, "You could fire me again."

And he laughed, low and affectionate. "No, I can't."

"Why not?"

His eyes caught hers, softening, and he gently smoothed a stray strand of hair back when the wind blew it across her face. "You're too valuable for that."

~Q~

Christine was in bed asleep, a warm dinner was waiting in the slow oven, and Brennan bided her time at the table sipping a mellow Merlot. Her thoughts still wandered over the past, tucking into stray memories while she resisted the urge to go back to her teak wood box and read the letter again. She didn't need the paper when she had the memories streaming and the reassurance that came from Booth's promise to her when they'd parted. After he finished processing the arrest, he would come home.

So she was waiting with the wine and dinner freshly finished, and his punctuality would provide further proof that she'd made the right decision. A grating sound at the front door indicated his key entering the lock, turning the tumblers, and a faint squeak when the hinges moved, and then he was in. She called out, standing to greet him.

"Did he confess?"

The murderer, another case solved.

"Yeah. He was hoping that no one would be able to identify the body or see the cause of death if he dumped the body into the air conditioning unit."

Brennan took up the bottle and poured generously into the twin glass, handing wine to Booth and feeling already a rush of anxiety. It was so important, what she needed to say and yet she didn't know how to begin smoothly. Writing another letter might be best, but it was too late for that option now. He was here, his eyes tired and cautious, and she didn't want to make him wait any longer. "Booth, I have to tell you something."

His response surprised her. A look of genuine panic erupted in his eyes and Booth's normally smooth speech sputtered awkwardly as he stalled for time.

"Uh, all right, look, Bones, please, just …" And he stepped closer, rejecting the wine, pleading with her. "You just got to give me a little more time, that's all. Please."

Why is he...? He thinks...

She tried to reassure him as understanding tricked in. "No, Booth, I'm not…" She shook her head and left off with a small laugh and a brighter smile that she hoped would assuage his fear. "I'm not leaving you."

Never. Well, never _again_, her precise mind insisted. It was better to do than to say because she said it wrong too often. Brennan stepped into him instead, wrapping her arms around his stiff body (he was so very tense) and pressed her entire length against his. Face, chest, belly, thighs, all in contact. Her nose nuzzled into the warm hollow above that long-ago broken clavicle (her favorite place to kiss him) and she breathed in a Boothy mix of musk and faded cologne. His arms came up around her and she sighed contentedly as if returning home for the first time in weeks.

Not going farther away when all she'd ever wanted was to be closer to him.

He pulled her closer, his body completing the circle and surrounding hers. The strong emotional stimulus of being near again provoked her eyes into tear production, but she had to say something before she started crying and couldn't say anything. So Brennan spoke into his throat, her words muffled against his warm and fragrant skin. "What I want to tell you..."

She pulled back, needing to see his eyes as she said the rest. "...is that I have absolute faith in you."

_Absolute._

Not qualified or diminished in any way.

Not relative or comparative.

Complete, 100%, in full measure.

Did he understand?

"I _trust_ you," she explained, in case he questioned her definition of faith also. He must not question this.

So far, he wasn't questioning anything. He wasn't speaking either, and the silence was worrisome enough that she decided to keep explaining until he understood. "I know you love me, and Christine, and…" She sighed, sadly ashamed to have forgotten who he was. "I'm sorry I lost sight of that temporarily."

But she'd remembered now. The words from the letter whispered their reassurance and she repeated it out loud. "You're a good man. You have your reasons and when you can, you'll share them with me."

He would bring her inside the wall when he was ready. She just had to wait.

Booth was so still and silent that she took it as a sign, as evidence in its own right, and that made her absolute faith all the more steady. Something had happened, something terrible that he'd carried alone all these months. If she were prone to leaping to conclusions, Brennan might already be able to guess who or what was the architect of the wall, but what claimed her in this moment was compassion for his suffering alone.

"I'm sorry," Brennan said gently, because (from the still tense and uneasy set of his body) she knew now with utter certainty that his burden remained (he was still alone in there) and she was filled with remorse over not seeing it sooner.

Sorry for doubting him. Sorry that so far, she hadn't been helping him bring her inside.

She hadn't been a good partner these last months, not the way she'd always tried to be before. She, the genius who knew Booth so well, hadn't connected his sudden obsession with Pelant to their broken engagement but now she understood the implications immediately, even before he tried to apologize.

"Look, I'm sorry," Booth began, but then he trailed off as if forbidden to say more.

Because she understood the implications of his silence, Brennan looked directly into his eyes with all the assurance of her absolute faith. "We'll be fine."

He nodded, cautious.

She couldn't help gathering a tiny tidbit of additional evidence, however, which she accomplished with a teasing little grin. "But the the next time..." He smiled back, hearing the promise of a continued future together, and she tossed her head pointedly because she'd met his demands once (she had finally set aside her stubborn refusals and done it for _him_) and she wouldn't be doing that again. "...next time it's your turn to ask me to marry you."

"I will," he promised softly. "As soon as I can, I will."

And now, it was the same compassion she'd felt when Booth told her he understood Harold. It was the same gratitude she'd experienced when Booth told her about Kosovo. It was the same joy she'd felt when Booth's hand pulled her out of the dirt of an early grave. If an explanatory model is upheld through rigorous testing, producing the same results again and again ... if it explains and predicts (and this one did) ... then it becomes a theory. A theory is sound, a foundation upon which other hypotheses rested and built.

"I know," she laughed, confident once again. This was the Theory of Booth: he is a good man.

And this was her hypothesis that rested on that theory: Pelant was involved in their broken engagement somehow.

~Q~

* * *

**Author's Note:** This story was written to explore the question: Can a scientist apply the scientific method to interpersonal relationships? Has Brennan made a rational decision? You'll have to be the judge, dear readers. :)


	5. Singularity

**Author's Note:** As I feared in the last chapter, there were too many ideas to condense into one single chapter (so there will be one more chapter after this). There's a longer note at the end that explains why.

This story is a delicate balance of science and faith (whoever says they are incompatible concepts doesn't fully understand either one, I tell you!) and now we return to the moment where Booth and Brennan fuse science and faith into something truly singular. As in definition numbers one, two and three.

Truly, their love is singular.

But at what moment does it become a singularity...?

* * *

~Q~

**Singularity:**

**1.** the state, fact, or quality of being singular

**2.** something distinguishing a person or thing from others

**3.** something remarkable or unusual

**4. ** _Astrophysics_ A point in space-time at which gravitational forces cause matter to have infinite density and infinitesimal volume, and space and time to become infinitely distorted.

**5. ** _Mathematics_ A point at which the derivative does not exist for a given function but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists. Also called _ singular point_.

~Q~

* * *

It was the fact that Booth's instincts were correct and overruled, and then borne out as correct, that made her decision an easy one.

Only a couple of weeks after her kitchen confession Sweets had come forward with a plan to draw Pelant out of hiding and Booth, growing weary of his confinement, had reluctantly agreed only for lack of a better idea. But his instincts warned it would backfire in some way. Brennan, uneasily, had worked with Cam and Angela to modify a freshly donated body into a gruesome parody of classic anatomical art, while Hodgins supplied insect larvae at a proper stage of development to simulate a murdered victim being out in the open several hours.

Angela had selected the painting they would display, choosing a Baroque image of Prometheus having his liver torn out. Booth arranged for Special Agent Flynn, still recovering from being shot ten times the year before, to deliver the altered body to the Arboretum and arrange it in the manner suggested by the myth. The story goes that Prometheus fooled Zeus twice, once over a choice of the best meat and a second time by stealing fire from the gods and delivering it to humans. As a punishment, Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock where every morning, an eagle ripped out his liver and every night, the stolen liver regenerated only to be torn out again the next day.

In retrospect, Brennan wondered if it was that impudent imitation that triggered Pelant's wrath. In retrospect, everything that happened next echoed the punishment of Prometheus for daring to play games with a god. Flynn and, by extension the staff of the Jeffersonian, was punished for stealing the fame Pelant wanted to keep for himself.

She felt the first sinking of dread when Hodgins stared blankly at a purple Monkshood flower (it didn't belong there) and murmured, "an enemy is near." And that was followed far too quickly by the sound of Flynn's unanswered voice-mail greeting being disrupted when Booth's own phone, his severed link to his friend, exploded against the rock where Flynn's body was bound. She looked down at the body with something akin to nausea. If there was a word for the sensations pouring through her body when Brennan looked back down at the remodeled bones (bullet wounds Booth recognized as Flynn's from the year before), she didn't know what it was. If a word even existed that could express in simple syllables the sick, clawing, icy and yet hot and roiling _guilt_ ... was there a word for that?

A forgery of a forgery ... something only a trickster would do.

It was a most macabre case of slaying the messenger, for Flynn was slain like Prometheus and thus Booth's instincts that Pelant would prevail in any scenario to draw him forth were borne out. _I should have listened to him,_ she thought bleakly. Watching Booth pace in short, furious circles around the stolen crime scene, Brennan knew she should have been more patient. She should have trusted his instincts.

"I almost feel sorry for Pelant," Cam said a few hours later as they all tried to contain their horror and work an autopsy on a man they knew.

And Brennan knew her friend was right. Now that Flynn was dead, "Booth is never going to give up." There would be a confrontation.

In the back of her mind, Howard Epps whispered what she was trying desperately not to consciously think. _'Everything that happens from here on in, is your fault.'_

~Q~

That was why her decision about Flynn's innocence was an easy one.

So she would not doubt Booth again, Brennan embraced the true meaning of absolute faith which meant trusting his instincts as well as his innate moral stance. Call it a hypothesis or call it faith; the information she acted upon was a strong suspicion that a hidden challenge between Booth and Pelant was playing out, a drama that could not end until they confronted each other. And Flynn, logically, was another innocent bystander. If he was complicit, why bother with the bait and switch...?

When they interviewed the surgeon who'd saved Flynn's life and discovered the extremely expensive procedure he'd undergone after an anonymous donation of funds for that express purpose ... then Brennan was all the more certain of Booth's instincts, even when she still felt unable to articulate the logic of Pelant paying millions to save a man whom he would later frame and then fillet on a rock.

Yes, the decision to defend Flynn was an easy one.

"Pelant paid that surgeon to save Flynn's life," Brennan said, still a bit surprised by the generosity and—even more surprisingly—by the hint of a conscience it betrayed. He'd never cared about collateral damage in the past and that he would care about Flynn (even if only temporarily) was puzzling.

"Well, that doesn't mean that, you know, he _knew_."

She agreed that Flynn was likely unaware of his benefactor or of his unwitting aid to the man they were trying to capture. "I think that Pelant is framing Flynn." She didn't know why, Booth would probably figure that out. Or Sweets, maybe.

"Why," Booth demanded.

"Because that's what _you_ believe."

"Whoa, wait a second, Bones." He chuffed a small, disbelieving laugh before she even finished the final word. "That is _not_ rational."

"Certainly it is." How could he not see it? Booth was glancing uneasily at their oblivious audience (so far, anyway, because Booth and Brennan bickering in the bullpen was a long-time fixture on this floor and thus no longer interesting enough to rouse attention focused elsewhere). When his troubled gaze came back to hers, Brennan began her argument. "You told that doctor that I couldn't possibly be wrong about the number of remodeled fractures I found. Why."

She knew why: he didn't question her expertise. He had absolute faith in her abilities and she had taken far too long to reach absolute faith in his. But she would not make that mistake again, and she would prove the logic of her trust in him by showing his reciprocating faith in her.

"Why? Because in all the time we've been working together, you have never been wrong about something like that."

Triumph bloomed as a slow smile while he spoke and yet vanished into irritation at having to argue with him over her answering, unquestioning faith in _him_ being right. "It is not _possible_ that you are wrong about Flynn, so I'm being completely rational."

Something almost magical seemed to happen then, even though Brennan would be the first to argue against the existence of magic. Booth's eyes softened and for an instant he even looked stunned. Disbelieving (but, she hoped, in a good way). It all happened in an instant, that transformation that changed him from her sparring partner to…

…someone she'd never seen before.

Booth in a state of rapture.

They were caught up in a singularity, time stretching to a vanishing point, the voices around them fading into white noise because everything within her, every atom, was drawn to him as a matter of simple gravitation. Somehow they'd passed the event horizon unnoticed and the fate of falling into a singularity is to become one with it.

How could something so subtle be so profound?

His body was a finely sculpted marvel of movement that she had quite often admired and yet when he leaped at her she was very unprepared. Booth's right hand appeared on her lower back, his left wrapping around her and in the space of a breath they were brought together, body to body, heart to heart. Mouth to mouth. Trapped in a singularity she had no desire to escape.

Time had no meaning here, neither in the lighting strike of a bold, Boothy move nor in the precious press of his lips against hers. Everything else outside of them stopped. Only love pressed against her as a tangible sensation, blending her into him all along their frontal boundaries and not only was it something she could _feel_ but also, most amazingly, it was something she could perfectly comprehend: science and faith. Singularities and soul mates.

_"...when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another..." _

The Soul Mates described by Aristophanes in Plato's _Symposium_.

Booth, though he had laughed at the myth, had always believed in the promise of it.

_"Making love. That's when two people become one."_

"It is impossible for two objects to occupy the same space," Brennan had objected all those years ago. (And she still knew this, even with her body pressed up against Booth's here in the bullpen, but that was only true outside the boundaries of an event horizon. Once inside a singularity, the laws of physics no longer apply. All matter blends together into something infinite and infinitely dense. All objects occupy the same space inside the singularity and the way to get there is by getting too close to escape it.)

"Yeah but when we get it right, we get close."

"To what, breaking the laws of physics?"

"Yeah, Bones. A miracle."

Perhaps miracle is merely another word for singularity.

Booth moved against her, bringing her closer and her sense of self as an individual faded even further and might have disappeared entirely, but then he let her go. Flushed, heated and floundering, Brennan discovered she must have stopped breathing for she was breathless now. As she caught her breath on a soft laugh, Brennan became aware of silent stares and a circle of suddenly inattentive agents starting to resume their interrupted work now that the singular sight of Seeley Booth kissing Temperance Brennan in the bullpen had come to an end.

_He kissed me here?_

"We, uh ... agreed to avoid public displays of affection, at the FBI."

Didn't they? Yes, she was sure they did. Booth wanted to project an air of professionalism.

Giddy. She was absolutely giddy from oxygen deprivation or maybe from ... something with chemicals. Brain chemistry.

"To hell with the FBI," Booth muttered, low, and the way his dark eyes held hers served only to scramble her thoughts even further. What's happened, she wondered in a daze. He was watching her, affectionate and amused, as she processed what he'd said.

The FBI didn't matter now?

"I have to go..." An overload of dopamine seemed to have dampened several other much needed neurotransmitters. Brennan found she had to pause and regroup because words were delayed by her overriding desire to stay right here. "...do..." She had to do something ... to help Booth ... and closed her eyes in an effort to corral her careening thoughts so she could remember what it was. "...scientific things, to catch a serial killer."

Not specific but close enough to at least be correct. It was very imprecise and for once Brennan didn't care ... until she noticed Booth was on the verge of laughing. The scientist lifted her chin proudly and marched past him, knowing full well if she turned to look back she was never going to leave.

~Q~

She metaphorically floated all the way back to the lab, coasting along on a wave of euphoria that gradually released her as she recalled the event that had initiated it in the first place: her outspoken faith in Booth and by extension, in Flynn's innocence.

When she got back to the lab, Brennan recalled the specific detail that there was an eleventh remodeled fracture not related to Flynn's shooting a year ago. That extra fracture was a clue for her, from Pelant. When she looked at it up close, she was astounded. The fracture was forged, an _expertly forged_ remodeled fracture that was so unusual, so distinct, that she recalled the only other time she'd seen anything like it. Many things became clear to her at that point:

In taking Flynn not only did Pelant gain the advantage, he used Flynn's body to deliver a layered message intended to trigger in her a memory that was nine years old. Pelant had somehow gained access to her own work (imitating her technique with a bone saw, and this fracture from a nearly decade old unsolved homicide) in the most direct of ways. It meant he'd seen these things up close.

...It meant he'd gained access to the Jeffersonian itself...

It meant there was something he wanted her to find in a nine year old cold case file (something she may have overlooked, or something else he'd planted).

Shades of Gormogon and Zack's betrayal shuddered through her, as well as a caution against hubris. True to her curious and driven nature, Brennan rushed to Limbo where she could pull out that ancient case and that is where he found her, because he'd been waiting for her to arrive.

Startled into wary stillness with a humerus in hand, Brennan felt her lips part on a breathy gasp. "Pelant."

It was almost a question, as she began to realize his challenge to Booth might be rooted in an interest in her. His clues were gifts, "from one neurological fruit to another." That's what he'd told her over the phone a year ago. It was also a tiny gasp of self-recrimination; partly dismay for not foreseeing this possibility (that he would be down here lying in wait), and partly a frisson of awareness that Pelant had effectively summoned her to Limbo.

He said he wanted to talk, but used what appeared to be a grenade to gain her compliance. "You and I are destined to die together, someday." His admiration for her was strongly mediated by an air of superiority, and Brennan sensed she was meant to bask in the glow of his attention, the way that human women were favored by the attentions of Zeus (only to be impregnated and then pursued with vengeance by his enraged spouse, Hera). Few of Zeus's consorts escaped unscathed.

As he complimented himself for discovering a link between cold cases that she had missed, she guessed his patronizing pitch to help her get past her evident 'mistakes' was intended to be magnanimous. "Don't be so hard on yourself," he soothed. "They were found in different geographical locations, killed by completely different methods, different ages, nothing to connect them. And yet, they were all killed by one person."

He gave her a series of numbers that she committed to memory instantly, numbers that corresponded to boxes stored in Limbo. "I know you. You'll find me. It's written in the stars."

And thus, his message delivered, he retreated after setting the grenade to scan for movement. Or so she thought. (Later Booth himself would reveal Pelant had never intended to hurt her because the grenade was a toy.) But before that, Brennan was left alone with nothing but the question of what Pelant wanted from her to occupy herself with while she waited for a security officer to make his rounds and discover her immobility.

Pelant was sending messages to Booth as well, she realized. There was a message in the way he breached their defenses and flaunted their vulnerability (I could kill any one of you, at any time). There was another message in the way Pelant tarnished the reputation of Flynn, and of Brennan herself when she was framed for murder. And there was a message in the way Pelant had trapped Brennan with a toy grenade that Booth would immediately recognize as a fake. He seemed to be goading Booth into deadly action.

By the time Booth arrived, Brennan understood. She told Booth, "He knows you're going to kill him."

She looked into Booth's cold eyes (all the warmth she'd seen in them earlier had now vanished in the cold light of Limbo). Since his arrival and understanding that Pelant had approached (threatened) her directly, she saw the way he had hardened, heard the precise crushing of a toy grenade under Booth's foot that made her think of crushing bones. Pelant had given her a chance to reach him before Booth did.

He knew she would go to stop a murderer. _"I know you. You'll find me. It's written in the stars."_

~Q~

Cam interrupted her increasingly frustrated investigation into the cold cases with a small piece of evidence she'd recovered from Flynn's stomach: a chipped tooth. Either Flynn had chipped his own tooth in memory of their conversation as he took the Prometheus body, or Pelant could have overheard the entire conversation if he'd bugged Flynn. She'd boasted to Flynn about having solved a case once from just a single tooth.

Brennan looked down at it, knowing that tooth might lead them to Pelant. "Hodgins should swab this for particulates."

Though Pelant wanted her to find him through the clues he'd given, the tooth could serve just as well. Getting to Pelant was the goal, but which route was the best way to get there? And which partner should get there first...? That was what she needed to understand.

~Q~

When she got back from Aldo's Paradise Lost, Brennan's course was set.

Though nine years ago she would have considered it unthinkable to trust a killer, her partnership with Booth had gradually changed definitions of even the most fundamental concepts. Words like truth, trust, faith and family had held narrow meanings for her until he lifted her inside his walls and showed her the world from his point of view. Bringing Booth inside her own metaphorical walls, teaching him her versions of those same words had ended up expanding both of their vocabularies, and with a sigh she remembered a very young Dr. Lance Sweets remarking, "You two complement each other."

And Booth laughing, misunderstanding the term because they didn't speak the same language yet.

Booth was a killer, yet he was fundamentally good. She trusted him with every particle of her being because she knew his reasons for ending a life were noble and selfless, a measure of last resort intended to save lives at the cost of his own soul.

In contrast, Pelant was a killer who was fundamentally evil. He killed for power and pride. She knew the puzzle he'd arranged for her would contain the information that would take her to him, and that he expected her to be lured by the prize he dangled in the summons: stop a still-hidden killer.

It was in the bodies, the bones, the cold cases. The only one of the six cases that was fully intact was Chloe Campbell, the oldest cold case. All the remaining cases Pelant had mentioned (1870, 3606, 4005, 7932 and 9224), were switched with still other cases. That slowed her down but once she got the proper cold cases laid out, Brennan looked for connections. The name 'Chloe' kept scratching at her, and she went finally to Google.

Chloe means "green shoots" and was one of the names associated with the Greek goddess of the harvest, Demeter. Brennan's pulse exploded. It couldn't be a coincidence.

One of the female victims bore the surname Leto... Another goddess impregnated by Zeus.

There was a man named Cyrus Swan ... Zeus seduced the goddess Nemesis by taking the form of a swan. Cygnus is an avian constellation, 'the swan.'

_"It's written in the stars..."_

Brennan pulled out a map and made a copy, then started marking the locations of where her cold case victims were recovered. It would be a constellation, she was certain of it, and likely one associated with Zeus. When she saw the pattern, however, she was stunned. It was not Cygnus, the swan. She wrote the word down. _Aquila_.

The Eagle.

Aquila was the Eagle that Zeus sent every morning to tear out the liver of Prometheus. It was the same eagle Zeus sent to abduct the beautiful youth named Ganymede as his servant (most sources also suggest Ganymede was Zeus's beloved companion, loved for his mind as well as his beauty because he was male). Some myths say Ganymede was set into the heavens as the constellation Aquarius, right next to Aquila.

After marking out the locations of the body finds, Brennan saw exactly one star was missing from the mapped constellation: Altair, the brightest star in Aquila.

Altair is Arabic, but it means Flying Eagle.

Now at last she understood the message and the choice she had to make. If Altair marked the spot, then she knew where Pelant was and what he was. Aquila was merely the servant of Zeus, the flying eagle. She was meant to be Ganymede, fetched by Aquila (by Altair) to serve a greater, godlike master.

It was the fact that Booth kissed her in the bullpen and said, _'to hell with the FBI'_ that told her which Booth was going to confront Pelant. And trusting Booth was what made her decision regarding the summons an easy one.

~Q~

* * *

**Author's Note:** With Brennan's faith in Booth established, I needed to set up the decisions that will be explained in the next chapter. This chapter feels a bit chaotic because there is still one key scene missing. I moved it to the beginning of the next chapter in order to establish Pelant's messages to _both_ Booth and Brennan here. (He's sending messages to Booth as well as to Brennan, but the ones to Booth are far more subtle.) Pelant's games take center stage here because they are the catalyst for what the partners each choose to do, and why.

**About Mythology and Classical Literature:** All the Greek mythology on display in the painting and Pelant's message to Brennan is accurately sketched. That's why Cam's line that Pelant wrote a love letter only Brennan could understand was so important. The real message in the mythology is why the exact nature of the 'sacrifice' in this episode is worth exploring in one final chapter... :)

You would probably question my sanity if you knew how much reading and research goes into some of these chapters. It's all hidden, for the most part, but there's often a bigger picture going on behind the scenes that informs how the story unfolds. Case in point, in addition to all that mythology, I also read Plato's _Symposium_ during the week I was sketching this because love in all of its power and forms is on trial here. And then my friend and fellow author Wendish mentioned Milton's _Paradise Lost_ in one of her reviews - which is why I ADORE reviews, they can be so incredibly inspiring! - and that got me to thinking about what Pelant was doing and whether he truly understood who Booth and Brennan are. All of which will be informing how the last chapter plays out.

So a huge thanks to Wendish because it's her fault there's going to be an extra chapter. (You can thank her by reading her story, _You and I Collide_, as long as you're old enough to read M rated stories. It's sweet, steamy and hilarious.)

Thanks for reading, everyone!

* * *

_Works Cited:_

For Greek Mythology: www . theoi . com

For Soul Mates: Plato, _Symposium_ (Kindle edition, pp. 53-54)


	6. Sacrifice

**Author's Note:** I'm terribly sorry this chapter is late. Most of my free time was taken up with Paradise Lost, which I wanted to read before I started writing this (but it's a long and complicated poem, and not to be rushed). I've had very little time for anything else this week, and that includes sending out thank you notes for reviews. A blanket thank you here will hopefully convey my gratitude regarding reviews because I'm not sure I will be able to catch up.

To all my reviewers, even though I may not always be able to individually thank each of you with a note, I appreciate you all and write with you in mind. _Thank you!_

* * *

~Q~

**Sacrifice:**

**1**. _(a)_ an act of slaughtering an animal or person or surrendering a possession as an offering to God or to a divine or supernatural figure.

_1. (b)_ an animal, person, or object offered in a sacrifice.

**2.** _(a)_ an act of giving up something valued for the sake of something else regarded as more important or worthy.

_2. (b)_ in Chess, a move intended to allow the opponent to win a pawn or piece, for strategic or tactical reasons.

~Q~

* * *

Working with Booth had taught Temperance Brennan to question herself. This observation, spoken softly to Cam, was rooted in all the discussions Brennan had undertaken with Booth himself over the years when they'd argued about motive. Actions were clear but the reasons behind them were occluded behind cranial bone, shrouded in neural tissue streaming electrical impulses that somehow, Booth read through muscular twitches on the face, sweat on the brow, breaths and sighs and movements of the eyes.

Blind to such cues, Brennan had dismissed motive as unknowable (but to God, who did not exist) and therefore unimportant. What mattered was what people _did_ (the assaults, the murders), and their consequences that she so often faced without knowing why it happened. What did a 'why' matter when one person was dead at the hands of another?

In justice, however, the why was just as important as the what that resulted. Killing in self defense was a vastly different act than the crime of killing in anger, and that in turn was treated more leniently than killing for profit. It all boiled down to the why behind the action. In helping Booth discover the who and the what, he helped bring out the why that occasionally revealed evil, but more often it revealed a tragedy borne of human failings.

Sometimes, good people did the wrong thing for the right reasons (her father and her former intern Zack, most especially).

Yes, in working with Booth she had learned that sometimes, the _why_ mattered more than the what.

~Q~

"Since good and bad are such subjective concepts, how could you ever be sure you were doing the right thing?"

Once upon a time, she'd asked Booth this very question as they discussed the rogue sniper Booth was determined to stop (former friend and current vigilante, Jacob Broadsky), sparking an argument between them and wounding her partner in the process. Booth thought she was questioning _him_ and took exception to the comparisons she'd made.

With Jacob Broadsky temporarily thwarted, Brennan sat beside Booth at the Founding Fathers and contemplated the argument she'd just ended merely by pointing out her metaphorical location - unquestionably beside him, like always - and worried that he had failed to understand what she'd been trying to learn from him when she'd compared his actions as a sniper to Broadsky's. It was a case of mistaken motive, hers this time.

"Booth?"

"Yeah, Bones?" He'd finished his drink and spent the last few minutes just as immersed in silent thought as she was. Her hesitance brought his head around to facing her and he waited for the inevitable question, knowing it was coming because he knew her.

"I know I upset you when I compared you to Broadsky."

He nodded, probably accepting what he assumed was going to be a backwards, Brennanite apology, but as usual she had a different route in mind.

"Yesterday I told Mr. Vincent Nigel-Murray that the way to find an answer is to ask the correct question. I didn't ask you the correct question and I'm sorry for that."

"It's okay," he soothed, and placed a gentle hand on her arm. A quick, reassuring squeeze intended to tell her all was well, then he withdrew because as far as Booth was concerned that was enough. (And they were still in a precarious place where touching for too long was forgotten territory they'd only just begun to explore again in the last couple of weeks since Hannah had rejected his proposal.) So he pulled his hand back and left it on the table beside her ulna, close enough that she could still feel the heat.

So close and yet she missed the warmth of his heavy hand on her. Brennan knew she was being foolish and sighed in self-reproach. "What I should have asked was, why is Broadsky _wrong_?"

"Gah," he groaned, and seemed to withdraw from her even further and she could tell he wished she would cease her probing of the inner workings of his conscience.

"Please, I don't know how else to ask!" Booth was always so certain, she imagined he must have a dependable algorithm that he applied to any given situation and, if that was the case, she wanted to know how he made his decisions. Broadsky's behavior was logical but it was also wrong; there must be something else she could use to guide her for the times when logic failed. Because she didn't want to be like Zack, making a tragic mistake for what seemed like a good reason but in reality was only self-delusion.

"Why are you asking at all?! Isn't it obvious?"

"No." Frustrated, she stared down at the coaster that supported her drink, a slightly soggy piece of cardboard advertising beverages and trivia questions that held obvious answers. Even if she didn't currently possess the knowledge, she could easily research the topic and glean the correct answer to a question that asked for a concrete solution: _"Question: How many items comprise the world's largest collection of beer-drinking vessels? Answer: over 13,000 glasses, collected from over 4000 breweries."_ This was information verified by the Guinness Book of World Records, an empirical point of fact. It was objective and quantifiable.

Moral situations did not provide data, merely subjective feelings and shifting circumstances that altered the very same action into the correct one in some cases but the wrong one in others. It was frustrating for an empiricist who wanted to grasp the nuances that could tell her when killing was commendable, versus when it edged over an inexact and arbitrary - not to mention a frequently arbitrarily shifting! - line. How could she ever know she was right, when logic wasn't enough and Booth wasn't available for consultation.

Broadsky shooting murderers who'd escaped justice, when there was irrefutable proof that they'd circumvented the system, did not appear to be morally wrong and yet Booth thought he was. _Why?_ Why was it good for Booth to shoot Radick who killed for hatred, but wrong for Broadsky to shoot Heather Taffet who killed for money? Why did he stop Brennan herself from shooting Howard Epps inside her own apartment all those years ago, but told her it was justified when she shot Gil Lappin in a dark and lonely postal sorting center? What was the difference that governed these similar shots and made only some of them morally justified?

Suddenly realizing that in thinking of her own experiences she'd stumbled across an important detail, Brennan looked back up at Booth and formed a better question. "Why was it acceptable for me to shoot Gill Lappin, but unacceptable for me to shoot Howard Epps?"

His guarded expression seemed to melt away as he remembered the circumstances of both situations, and started to understand her confusion at last. She was comparing motives, not methods, and for the same reason she couldn't let the question go, Booth responded to the _why_ behind her probing. "You shot Lappin to save me. You thought he was going to kill me."

"He was," she breathed softly, remembering the pipe raised up overhead, poised to come smashing down into Booth's precious skull to crush him. To kill. So she'd squeezed the trigger almost on instinct, squeezed and breathed and the gun went off without conscious thought other than to protect her partner. "But Epps was going to kill _me_ and you wouldn't let me shoot him."

"No, Bones, not once I was there. It would have been murder."

"Why?"

What is murder but the unsanctioned killing of another human being?

If it would have been morally justified before Booth arrived, why did his presence change things? When does killing become murder, where is the fuzzy grey line. Now that she'd turned her question onto herself, Booth had lost his defensiveness. He could face her and the moral dilemma with an unbiased eye (relatively speaking) and as she'd hoped, he had an answer.

"Because I wouldn't have let him shoot you."

Booth was a protector, this she knew, and he'd gone to her apartment that night to protect her from Epps. "You would have shot him to save me?"

"Yeah." Unapologetic. Booth dropped his warm eyes back down to his empty beer glass, shrugged a little. On the few occasions when her life had been seriously threatened, Booth had killed for her.

"And if he'd have turned his tire iron on you," Brennan reasoned carefully, "then if I shot him, that would be justified? Because I'd be saving your life?"

"Yeah," he said again and just that fast they were connected again with locked gazes and an another reassuring touch of his hand.

Pinching her lips tight as she applied this new insight to Broadsky, Brennan found she could use inductive reasoning to know what criteria Booth must apply to moral situations. "Broadsky profited from the shootings," she offered slowly. And he wasn't saving lives.

Booth confirmed her conclusion a moment later. "If you're killing to save a life, it's never wrong."

~Q~

When Cam brought the chipped tooth, showing Brennan an alternate path to Pelant's location, Brennan realized she had a decision to make. A moral decision.

It was only because she'd learned how very much a why could matter that Brennan began questioning herself. If the goal was merely to reach Pelant and end his reign of misery, then did the how matter? Did the why? Why did Booth want to kill Pelant? Why did she want to follow the clues Pelant had left to help her locate him? If the goal was merely to find Pelant, then Flynn's tooth would serve and she could abandon the cold cases.

But if she abandoned the cold cases, would another killer go free?

Thoroughly frustrated, she jutted her jaw forward and frowned her way through afternoon traffic until finally the small pub came into view. Once inside the perpetually uninhabited Paradise Lost, she spotted former Father Aldo Clemmons leaning against the back of the bar with a newspaper open. A tiny squeak sounded, signalling her entrance and he snapped the paper shut and grew attentive when he saw her come in.

Just past the threshold Brennan hesitated, knowing that to cloud her mind with alcohol would be a terrible decision, but she recalled the price of Aldo's advice had always included a purchase. "Is it okay if I don't have a drink?"

Exasperated, Aldo groaned. "No, you people are killing me here. This is a business."

She glanced around, noting again the dearth of patronage and wondered why no one ever seemed interested in this particular paradise. "Not a very good business."

"Because people don't buy drinks."

A rudimentary recollection of the epic poem trickled down, the idea that paradise existed only for those willing to abide by the rules and for Adam and Eve, there was only one rule: don't eat from the Tree of Knowledge. In Aldo's paradise, the singular rule was equally simple: _do_ purchase a beverage to keep the garden flowing with ... advice. There, the metaphor broke completely under its own foolish irreverence because alcohol was generally known to remove knowledge and wisdom, not enhance it. Thus Brennan came closer, proposing a compromise and cash. "Okay, what if I buy a drink but don't drink it."

(After the money exchanged hands, she would be in possession of the beverage and free to waste the libation as she saw fit, and he would be satisfied that rules were followed.) He shifted forward, slapping the counter for her to sit with a resigned shrug. "That works for me."

So she slapped a five dollar bill on the bar, and took a seat on the same barstool she'd tested before. Before he'd even finished pouring out the drink she would not consume, Brennan blurted out, "Booth wants to kill Pelant. Which is _fine_, he's a very bad man; he has murdered ... we don't know how many people."

And there would be no justice otherwise, for he had demonstrated twice already his ability to slip through legal crevices until he disappeared, only to return in a new form that required an entirely new battle. If insanity was doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results, then it would be insane to arrest Pelant. He would only escape again. And kill again.

Death, on the other hand, was inescapable. Booth could bring the insanity to an end with just one shot. Logically, it was the only moral option and thus the idea of Booth killing Pelant didn't really bother her when weighed against the consequences of his continued existence. It was only that idea that Pelant had whispered to her in Limbo about another hidden serial killer that had brought her here. That, and a niggling suspicion that killing him might be morally wrong. "What if there's someone worse and we need Pelant to catch _that_ killer?"

Aldo listened to her gravely, but when she got to the last question he sighed and shook his weary head. "God…" Then he seemed almost amused. "It's these ethical dilemmas that drove me out of the priesthood."

And clearly he did not want to go back.

"I need to know what Booth is going to do," Brennan explained. Would he lead a charge of FBI agents to take Pelant's location, or would he go alone? Would he act under the auspices of government authority, or would he take a vigilante stance and go in alone to kill. It was a question of grave importance to her.

"So you can protect Pelant," Aldo guessed, and not with approval.

"He's more valuable alive than dead, that's all." More valuable to Booth's conscience, at any rate. Whether Pelant would really cooperate and help her find another killer was almost moot at this point. The only thing that mattered was motive, Booth's motive, because that was how she would come to understand her own.

She actually expected more of an argument but Aldo jumped directly to the answer she needed. "It depends which Booth is there."

"Seeley Booth, the one I love," she reminded him. Because there was only one Booth.

"No. I mean, like all of us, he has two sides to him. There's one side that wants to save the world, and one side that wants to take care of the people he loves. Those two collide, well, that's what you call a tortured soul."

"There's no such thing as a soul." They'd gone over this before. A sinking in her belly signaled the advance of what she had already begun to fear. Flynn's death at Pelant's hands, Pelant leaving her stranded with that toy grenade, Booth's stony eyes: Pelant was goading her partner by lobbing threats ever closer to home.

"Says you," Aldo dismissed, "but Booth values nothing higher than his soul. Yet … he's willing to sacrifice his soul by killing Pelant."

Could killing Pelant serve a greater good...? If it was to save lives (to save the world), Booth would be able to justify his actions and his soul would not be in danger.

But if Booth went alone because he was spurred by wrath (as she was increasingly becoming certain he would do), his actions would fall outside the sanctions of government. In effect, he would become that which he hated - a vigilante on the wrong side of justice, like Jacob Broadsky - and she knew it would torment him afterwards. He would do it and then hate himself.

"Why," she breathed softly. Motive, the only thing that mattered now. Was it vengeance? Was it wrath? Or was it to protect her?

As if he'd read her mind, as if he knew Booth as well as she did, Aldo laughed softly. "For you, of course."

Sickened, she met his gaze with her own growing anguish.

"It's always going to come down to you."

That was her greatest fear, the reason she'd come here.

"Do you have coffee?" Abruptly Brennan reached into her purse and withdrew more cash, plunking down payment for clarity of mind and sharpening of her synapses because following Pelant's clues would take all the mental power she could conjure.

"I'll have to brew it," he complained.

"I promise I'll drink it," she countered.

"And waste half the pot?"

Another battle played out between them, one Brennan knew contained nuances that were lost on her because it was always her curse to misunderstand motive. "Do you need me to drink all of it?"

Aldo moved a few steps away, preparing the brew quickly as if to get started before she could change her mind. "Only if you want to." He still believed in free will; no matter what he offered, it would be her choice to consume it. To take it in and let it work in her.

Gathering her thoughts, she watched the coffee grounds tumble into the basket and the basket sliding into place before her own worries were ordered enough to proceed. "Pelant left me a message and waited inside the Jeffersonian for me to follow up on it. He spoke to me directly."

Aldo didn't pause, merely pushed the button and slid the empty pot into place but when he turned around and she saw the darkness in his eyes, Brennan knew motive mattered.

"Tell me what happened."

While she spoke, the coffee brewed. Her story was short, succinct, her description of the grenade making his face grow even more still. But what finally sparked Aldo Clemmons back into motion was her worry over the message Pelant whispered as he left: _"I know you. You'll find me."_

Leaning over the bar, he asked softly, "Does he know you, Temperance?"

"He's been watching me for years." Her voice shook with the acceptance of it, but the scent of coffee seemed to clear her head as she asked herself the same question again and again. _Why?_ "He knows my work."

Aldo nodded. While she'd told him about Pelant's message the coffee completed its brewing cycle. Now it poured darkly into a darker cup, dark brown in darker black porcelain, which he proffered as an elixir while his wisdom joined it. "And he tempted you with pride, suggesting that as smart as you are, you've missed something."

The coffee went down bitterly, undiluted by milk or sugar. She welcomed the shock of burning and bitter aftertaste, letting it purge the acids haunting the back of her mouth all day from anxious dyspepsia. "He left clues for me to follow, he thinks that I will."

"Because of vanity."

That was the second time he'd said as much. Brennan shook her head and laughed a little. "My appearance has nothing to do with this."

"Vanity is not just a question of appearance, it's a combination of pride and self-importance. Do you think Pelant was appealing to your pride, or his own?"

What Cam had asked her earlier came to mind, _"Do you really think Pelant found something that you missed...?"_ Such an overweening confidence in her own abilities, (abilities that Booth had praised only hours ago), would dictate an impossibility of her missing any clue. If she were truly vain (prideful), she would not follow Pelant's clues; she would not believe him to be more skilled than she was.

Now at a loss, Brennan looked helplessly to Aldo and shook her head again. "I don't know."

"Did you ever read Paradise Lost?" he suddenly asked.

She thought of the name of his business, the way he'd turned away from his own calling (but not his religious faith). She'd read the epic poem in high school, but not since then and after all this time the themes were hazy at best. Sin and redemption, the fall of humanity that caused Adam and Eve to be expelled from the Garden of Eden. A loss of innocence and paradise. "Satan's greatest sin was pride," she recalled, tying the sins into what she and Aldo had just discussed. "Eve was persuaded by vanity in her appearance, but also envy. She wanted to be more knowledgeable."

Pouring some coffee into his own cup, he gestured for her to drink hers, which she did. "Why did Adam sin? Do you remember?"

"Because he loved Eve..." She swallowed the hot brew too quickly, almost choking on it and gasping when tears came to her eyes because the bolus was too large and hot to go down easily. Was Booth like Adam, dooming himself for love? She couldn't let it happen. Almost dropping the cup, feeling a splash of brown liquid escape the confines of the cup to strike her hand as she pushed it back, Brennan bolted up out of her seat. "I have to go."

"Temperance."

Somehow his steady calm halted her escape in progress, brushed her frantic worries aside and Brennan focused on Aldo once more. "What?"

"Let me ask again: does Pelant know you?"

"Maybe. I don't care. I only care about Booth."

He held her in thrall for a moment longer, nodding solemnly. "Then you need to decide who you are. Are you Eve, who was misled by her own ambition? Or are you Adam...? Once you have that settled, you'll know what to do with Pelant's message."

~Q~

Once she returned to the Jeffersonain, Brennan plunged into the cold cases with steely resolve. Who did Pelant think she was, Eve? Was that the message was he counting on her to find? As she looked down at the constellation of the eagle, the messenger of a god, at last she saw that he'd summoned her to serve. There would be nothing to learn from him, no reason to preserve his life, because he parted with information only to manipulate her into going.

Hodgins was running the trace analysis on Flynn's chipped tooth, but she couldn't rely on that alone. Brennan left her notes and clues to her location sitting openly on her desk, knowing they would come look for her and she needed to be sure Booth would know where she was. If not from the tooth, then from Pelant's clues.

~Q~

In the game of chess, an important piece may be sacrificed to bring the opponent out into the open, or at least removing a barrier and exposing a vulnerable square. Sweets had argued that the Prometheus body was just such a sacrifice, Flynn was a still greater loss, and now Brennan added herself to the list. By surrendering herself to Pelant, she placed herself in danger. She would draw him out but more importantly, she would give Booth an undeniable justification.

He would kill to save her and it would not be morally wrong.

With a steadiness of purpose that she found quite soothing despite the fear thrumming in her ears, Brennan entered Pelant's power plant and waited for the next clue. She was not surprised when his disembodied voice sounded from hidden speakers (he was playing the part of a god somewhat enthusiastically) but followed his directions with outward calm and inward deliberation that stuttered only when she heard doors slamming shut behind her.

As she made her way deeper into the heart of his lair, Brennan plotted her own chess game against a well-armed foe. She would request his surrender. Assuming that bid would prove unsuccessful, the next option was to stall for time by giving the appearance of control (or cooperation) just long enough to let Booth reach her.

At the bottom of a catwalk Brennan came across an expanse of monitors, wherein Pelant's damaged face came into view (segmented by screens, yet larger than life).

"Temperance. You look beautiful."

_He thinks I'm Eve,_ Brennan realized. He thought she'd come for knowledge and flattery.

Over the panel of monitors, Pelant revealed more of his intentions when he asked, "How much time do you think we have before Booth gets here?"

"I'm alone," she told him, hoping he would think it true.

"Yes." He finally stepped out into the open behind her and smiled, a rather sickly smile. "But that never lasts for very long. Does it."

Even Pelant understood that there is no escaping a singularity.

~Q~

The sound of his voice reduced to merely human and close caused her to whirl and pull up the gun clenched tightly in her fist. Brennan ran through calculations, gauging time the same way Pelant seemed to be doing. She no longer cared about his motive, now that the sacrifice was underway. Nothing mattered but saving Booth from the sin of wrath.

Appealing to logic and his innate desire for self-preservation, Brennan made the offer. "If you surrender to me, Booth won't kill you."

"And if I don't, you'll shoot me…?" His hands were raised, his voice was calmly deliberative, causing her to wonder if Pelant had a better grasp of her motivation than she'd originally thought. He didn't sound convinced. She flinched but nodded in reply, thinking it better to commit a murder herself than to let Booth do it. "Then there's only one rational choice," Pelant concluded calmly.

The only rational choice was surrender. Their eyes held, hers glowing with purpose and his half hidden behind a cataract and shadows. She hoped his rational decision coincided with hers. "Good."

"But you know Booth," Pelant continued in a personable tone. "Very sneaky, very stealthy. Sniper at heart. It'll take him forever to get inside."

This was the sacrifice she'd made, leaving the clues for Booth to find. If Booth knew she was here, he would not enter as a sniper. He would approach as a paladin, the chivalrous warrior, protective and fierce and trading stealth for speed.

Pelant seemed to be stalling also, or perhaps he was sussing out her motive. "If I try to run away, where will you shoot me?"

"In the head." Lethal and quick. She was an expert marks-woman (no matter what Booth teased, Brennan had always been an excellent shot - a fact that neither Gil Lappin nor Pam Noonan had lived long enough to appreciate).

"Never the head," he disagreed with a little laugh. "That's the part of me that you like best."

She gestured for him to go in front of her, hoping still for a surrender. He shrugged and walked ahead of her agreeably, tossing back a question to keep her engaged. "This mysterious serial killer, are you curious why I think it's a woman?"

"No." If she'd missed a clue, she would find it on her own and if he thought she'd come for that, Pelant didn't know her at all. Aldo's advice pushed her thoughts in a different direction, reminding her who she was. (Adam was wise, accepted knowledge only from benevolent sources. Adam acted with love, condemning himself rather than to be separated from Eve. But she was neither Adam nor Eve; forewarned, Brennan saw the danger and would not let either one of them fall.)

Save Booth from wrath. Save Flynn from ignominy. "But I do want to know if Hayes Flynn was working with you."

"Not willingly," Pelant confirmed in an offhand manner that gave her a crushing sense of injustice deep in her chest. Pelant had framed Flynn, just as he'd framed her, and both actions had enraged her partner. "I mean, he didn't know about the money in his fridge or the bug in his car. Please drop the gun."

Brennan was so caught up in her outrage and his command followed so fast upon the heels of Flynn's exoneration that she didn't comprehend the last thing he'd said. "What?"

He had reached a panel, turning to face her with one dark, triumphant eye boring into hers. In that instant she recognized anticipation - his - and knew he'd gained the advantage. Pelant reached up to press a button and instantly she was blasted with noise and heat. She fell, losing her gun, her hearing, her sense of direction all at once.

Before she could recover Pelant had reached her and he sounded strangely remorseful. "Hey, can you hear me? I … I tried to shape the blast so that it wouldn't deafen you, but you know, nobody's perfect."

He took her hand almost tenderly, helping her up, and to Brennan's still sound-shocked mind he actually seemed to care about her safety. For why else would he brush her off, fuss over her clothes and sound so regretful. "Here, come here. Hey."

With his help she stood, shaking from the disorientation and as her senses settled she heard him gloating again. "I'm _always_ ahead of you people. I … I know how you work. You let me lead you into this trap and Booth is still circling the building looking for a way in…"

"Looks like I came full circle." The unexpected voice startled them both, caused them to gasp and straighten. It was Booth, emerging from a shadowed passageway wearing only a black t-shirt and carrying only a single, small pistol. Her black-clad protector was more grim than Galahad, his muscled arms raised and his sights locked on Pelant. "You okay, Bones?"

"I'm okay."

She glanced from her partner, (steeled and standing rigid with protective purpose), to their foe, who was himself glancing back and forth and starting to understand he'd misjudged Booth. What he might not yet realize was that he'd actually misjudged them both. Partners in parity, locked in singularity, would act in unison. The only thing Booth needed was permission, and by coming here first, Brennan had ensured he would have it.

She'd given Pelant the chance to surrender to her, which he'd declined. He could still save his own life by surrendering to Booth but within an instant he'd adopted a fatal course instead.

"Surprise! The next explosion will level the entire building." Where it came from was a mystery, but Pelant brandished a small black box and latched onto Brennan's left arm. Dragging her closer (a human shield, the coward), he glared at his adversary with more confidence than the situation warranted. "Dr. Brennan, tell Booth to leave now or I'll blow us all up."

He counted on her trying to save Booth's life by sacrificing her own. Instead of obeying, she tried one last time to prevent a death and hoped what she said was true. "He's bluffing. It's a toy just like the last time." (A bluffing man will capitulate when his bluff is called.)

Her partner didn't flinch, didn't do anything but step closer. "I'm not gonna to take that risk." _If you're killing to save a life, it's never wrong._

Pelant began to crow, misunderstanding partners in parity. "Do you see, Booth? She's willing to risk your _life_ to keep me alive. What does that tell you?"

Brennan twisted to glare at him in shocked, horrified dismay: not bluffs but lies. Booth wasn't listening to the lies, however. The only warning came out almost like a caress, silky and calm. "You put it down, or I'm gonna kill you."

"Shoot him, Booth." Permission granted; culpability avoided. She began to struggle, trying to jerk her arm loose from a man who wasn't bluffing. A killer who'd trapped her and held a detonator aloft.

The tide had turned against him, fate roaring like a demon to clutch at him, to blast him outside of the singularity. Pelant gazed at her in astonishment as the depths of his miscalculations became manifest. "What?"

Fiercely, she spoke to her soulmate, knowing his need as well as she knew her own. "I'm not willing to risk your life to keep Pelant alive! Not for one second. Shoot him."

"Time's up." Booth declared.

Pelant's visage hardened into a snarl and his hand twitched to press the button that would take her life. _If you're killing to save a life, it's never wrong._ Booth's finger twitched: one tiny twitch that ended a life.

The bullet slammed into the sternal angle joining the sternum with the manubrium, transecting it to pierce the ascending aorta. Pelant fell quickly, his eyes wide and surprised as liters of blood gushed to find no exit and compressed his lungs inside the confined space.

"You okay?" Booth lowered the gun, closing the distance between them no faster than she could throw herself the rest of the way with a gasp of belated terror. "You're okay," he repeated tenderly, closing his arms around her. "He's dead."

"He is dead," she breathed, and for a few glorious seconds she just let Booth hold her while she held him and experienced gratitude.

But death is never instantaneous, it's a process that takes minutes. It would take up to a minute before Pelant lost consciousness. Pulling out of Booth's embrace, Brennan pivoted and dropped at Pelant's side. His lips moved but no sounds came (because his lungs were too severely compromised by their immersion in blood), his eyes beginning to dull already from the catastrophic blood loss that remained hidden inside his fully intact thoracic cavity.

He was dying.

"I tried to stop this." With a compassion that surprised her, Brennan touched his cheek. "I'm sorry."

His one good eye held on to hers for a few seconds longer, until death claimed him.

"Bones." Booth pulled her up and away and she came away willingly, turning to find wrath directed at her. "What the hell were you doing here?"

"I asked him to surrender."

Furious and frustrated, he thundered, "That's my job, I'm the FBI guy, remember?"

It was not hard to read the anguished aggravation in him, but Brennan lifted her chin in that way that she had when she was about to set things straight. "Of course I remember your job, Booth, and mine too. _You_ divided our labor, giving yourself the task of shooting and me the task of cuffing suspects. I brought handcuffs."

And she was going to pull out the proof when Booth shook his head in bemusement and pulled her further away. "We're gonna need a new division of labor here..."

~Q~

* * *

**Author's Note:** Pelant's ultimate plan still eludes me, but I've guessed he knew Brennan would arrive armed and dangerous (hence the rigged explosion that disarmed her). However, he also banked on her valuing knowledge over love, and that was his fatal mistake. Brennan went intending to protect Booth's soul and she was willing to sacrifice herself to do it. Meanwhile, Booth went intending to protect Brennan's heart and was willing to sacrifice his soul to do it.

That, my dear readers, was the Sense in the Sacrifice. :)

Thank you for reading!


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